Agreeing with critics and city staff that their planned five-story, two-building project at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and University Avenue wasn’t the best piece of design Berkeley has ever seen, the developers tried to get a city board to come up with an alternative Thursday. 

The project would be built at the site of the strip mall at the northwest corner of the intersection that now houses the Kragen Auto Parts store. 

Chris Hudson and Evan McDonald walked into the Zoning Adjustments Board meeting kn owing that the city planning staff had called the board to reject the mass and five-story height of the 1885 University Ave. complex so the developers could come up with an alternative. 

But the only things Hudson and McDonald had to show ZAB members were the same plans and drawings that ZAB had spurned six months earlier, along with two letters, one an admonition-laced missive from their attorney. They told the board that if they didn’t like the plans for the building, they should come up with another design themselves. 

Senior Planner Debbie Sanderson said city staff recommended a rejection so the developers could then present a new plan to the city’s Design Review Committee, the first step towards bring the proposal back to ZAB for a final approval. 

“They want recommendations more specific than last time,” she said, referring to the April session when ZAB members last looked at the Hudson McDonald LLC proposal. 

‘Like San Quentin’ 

To say that members disliked the original plans by architect Kirk Peterson is almost faint praise compared with member Jesse Anthony’s critique Thursday. 

“Some buildings make you happy to see them,” Anthony said. But as for the design for 1885 University Ave., “Put bars on it, and it looks like a prison,” he said. “To me, it looks like San Quentin. It’s an indecent building. It just looks terrible.” 

“I’m more uncomfortable than ever with this,” said ZAB member Dave Blake. “It’s going to be very hard to give direction on a building that isn’t going to look like this.” 

For mer Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean, filling in Thursday for absent member Bob Allen, said she favored outright denial.  

Member Dean Metzger asked Sanderson if the board could simply deny the project so that the applicants could start the process over with an entirely new design. 

Because the application has been pending in the Planning Department for two-and-a-half years, Sanderson said, “We think it is fairer and more expeditious to give them very specific directions for specific boundaries for a redesign.” 

“Its not our job to design a building,” said member Chris Tiedemann. “Given that this is not the design that anyone contemplates, we should focus on the staff recommendations and keep our suggestions simple.” 

The developer said the city staff report “is seriously flawed and contains many factual errors” and presented the panel with a four-page letter challenging the document as well as a second four-page letter from San Francisco attorney Allen Matkins threatening litigation should the city deny the p roject. 

McDonald’s letter faulted the staff report for its declaration that their project had raised significant opposition, charging instead that most of it came from “a small number of dedicated opponents.” 

He didn’t add that the opponents were heavily drawn from residents who live on Berkeley Way, which borders the project on the north and Grant Street to the west, and would be most impacted by the project. 

Neighbors worried 

“The project needs to die a timely death,” said Steve Wollmer, a neighbor and an activist with PlanBerkeley.org who offered praise for the staff report. “There needs to be more adult supervision and participation between neighbors and the developer.” 

Regan Richardson, another Berkeley Way resident, reiterated Wollmer’s call to include neighbors in the planning process and faulted the plans for inadequate parking and insufficient setbacks from smaller adjacent residences. 

Sarah Hilders, a Grant Street resident, said the expanded commercial space would lead to further traffic p roblems on her street and called for speed bumps to be added to both Grant and Berkeley Way to keep traffic under control. 

Valerie Artese, who lives three doors down Berkeley Way from the project site, said the building would cast her garden into long ho urs of shadow in the summer months and create “a huge, huge parking mess.” 

Trader Joe’s 

Neighbors were especially concerned to hear that the developers are planning to include 15,000 square feet for a Trader Joe’s market. 

“There needs to be a better me chanism for informing the public,” said Jonathan Stillman, who lives 150 feet from the site. He complained that he had only received the city staff report on the day of the meeting. 

“I will lose my view of the hills,” said Stephen Olson, president of the University Lofts Homeowners Association, a condominium project at University and Grant. He also predicted more traffic in the area as a result of the Trader Joe’s. 

Tom Hunt, a Berkeley Way resident, said he agreed with former Mayor Dean that “you should deny this and move on to something that the developer, the people in the neighborhood and you can all be proud of.” 

In rebuttal, Chris Hudson said that any denial would be immediately appealed because any new project would have to adhere to the new zoning policies of the University Avenue Strategic Plan (UASP), which he said virtually precludes development on the thoroughfare. 

“I hope there will be a series of meeting with neighbors, with written outcomes so there are no misunderstandings,” said Dean. “It will be a difficult and controversial process.” 

Dean also said she didn’t think the traffic problems generated by the presence of a popular market could be solved simply by establishing a traffic light at MLK and Berkeley Way, and said that the devel opers should have to prove that their project couldn’t be built under the UASP zoning. 

“This is a real loggerhead,” said Hudson. “State law is clear that it conforms to the zoning. We have to protect the rights given to this piece of property.” 

In the e nd, with only Dean Metzger voting to reject the plan, the board sent the project back to the developers with the criticisms generated in April and recommendations to add a setback and landscaping along Berkeley Way and to include more open space for residents of the complex.?t

With only City Councilmember Kriss Worthington’s two appointments yet to be named, the panel responsible for helping to formulate a new downtown plan is almost in place. 

Mayor Tom Bates and councilmembers Dona Spring, Darryl Moore and Max Anderson announced their appointments Monday, with Bates picking Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) Executive Director Will Travis to serve as chair of the 21-member panel. 

Travis also served on the staff of the California Coastal Commission and was a consultant on the master plan for the East Bay Regional Parks District. 

Bates’ other pick is Juliet Lamont, an outspoken advocate of daylighting the city’s buried creeks. She holds a doctorate in environmental planning from UC Berkeley. Among her other involvements, she recently served as vice chair of the Sierra Club executive committee. 

Each of Berkeley’s nine councilmembers has two appointments to the committee, and the Planning Commission has three. 

The panel is the result of the settlement of the city’s suit challenging UC Berkeley’s Long Range Development Plan for 2025. The group is charged with preparing a draft plan no later than November 2007, when it will then disband. 

Councilmember Spring appointed another Sierra Club activist, Wendy Alfsen, who also served on the Planning Commission’s UC Hotel Task Force, which formulated suggested guidelines for a hotel the university is planning for the northeast corner of the intersection of University Avenue and Center Street. 

Alfsen lives a half-bloc k outside the committee’s planning area and is active in the McKinley Addison Allston Grant Neighborhood Association (MAAGNA), Spring said. 

Her other appointment, Lisa Stephens, has lived in the planning area since 1990 and served on the group that prepa red the city’s existing downtown plan in 1990. She also served as Spring’s representative on the Parks and Recreation Commission from 1993 to 2001 and, like Lamont, is a creek daylighting proponent, Spring said. 

Councilmember Darryl Moore appointed Berke ley High School Lead Safety Officer Billy Keys, who has also served on the school’s site committee. Moore’s other appointment, Maria Guadalupe Gallegos-Diaz, is director of Chicano/Latino Affairs at UC Berkeley. She also serves on the board of the Chicana/Latina Foundation. 

Councilmember Max Anderson appointed former City Councilmember Carole Kennerly, who currently works for the Alameda County Health Department. 

“She has a wealth of experience,” Anderson said. 

His other appointment, Planning Commissio ner Rob Wrenn, also serves on the Transportation Commission and served on the UC Hotel Task Force as well. 

With the addition of Wrenn, the panel now has five planning commissioners, potentially a problem under the Brown Act, which would consider the meet ings when all five were present to be legally meetings of that commission. 

The others are Planning Commission Chair Harry Pollack, who was previously appointed by Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, and members Gene Poschman, Helen Burke, another Sierra Club a ctivist, and Susan Wengraf, Councilmember Olds’ aide, who were chosen by a vote of the planning commission against the wishes of Pollack and Wengraf. 

Wozniak’s other choice was University of California journalism faculty member Linda Schacht. 

Councilmem ber Laurie Capitelli’s choices were former Councilmember Mim Hawley and Zoning Commissioner Raudell Wilson, the chair of the Downtown Berkeley Association. Betty Olds picked retired University of California planning executive and Livable Berkeley board member Dorothy Walker and Jenny Wenk of the Downtown Berkeley YMCA. Linda Maio named Victoria Eisen, a planning consultant who has worked for the Association of Bay Area Governments and Winston Burton of BOSS, a social service non-profit. 

Worthington said Monday that he’s still interviewing candidates, and asked that anyone interested contact him at his office in City Hall. 

Four candidates are scheduled for interviews today (Tuesday), Worthington said, “and I’m looking for more to find just the right comb ination. It’s very hard to find someone who’s familiar with planning, land use, landmark, housing and the other issues the committee will be dealing with. I’m happy to talk to anyone who wants to serve.” 

Cisco DeVries, chief of staff for Mayor Bates, said Monday that “it won’t cause any calamity” if Worthington misses the 5 p.m. deadline. “I’m sure we’ll survive,” he added.?

Peralta Community College District Trustee Marcie Hodge stepped up two campaigns last week—one against Peralta’s Office of International and Global Education, the other for the 6th District Oakland City Council seat currently held by Desley Brooks. 

Hodg e sent out a mass mailing of a four-page political campaign-looking “This has got to stop!” brochure last week announcing that “Waste and frivolous spending in the Peralta Community College District has gone on for too long. Help me clean house.” 

The cha rges were aimed at the district’s international student recruitment office that came under intense scrutiny several years ago under the administration of former Chancellor Ronald Temple. At that time, the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury conducted an inves tigation into charges that Temple and several trustees made numerous unnecessary trips abroad under the office’s budget. As a result of that controversy, international travel by Peralta trustees was curtailed. 

Hodge’s brochure was sent to residents in he r Area 2 trustee district as well as to residents of the Oakland City Council 6th District who do not live in Hodge’s trustee district. While both districts are in East Oakland, Hodge’s trustee district is further towards the San Leandro border than the 6th District, and there is only a small area near Seminary Avenue where the two districts overlap. 

Money for the brochures was reportedly provided by a $1,000 a head fund-raiser sponsored for Hodge by Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente. 

Responding to the same charges listed in the brochure made by Hodge at a trustee meeting last September, fellow Peralta trustee Linda Handy said, “I recognize that Trustee Hodge is campaigning for office, and unfortunately it’s going to be on the backs of our employees.” 

Hodge and her brother, former Oakland School Board member Jason Hodge, could not be reached for comment for this article. Jason Hodge’s residence telephone number is listed as the contact number on the “This has got to stop!” brochures. 

The brochures include a letter from Hodge addressed to “dear neighbors,” which charges that staff from Peralta’s International and Global Education department “spends lavishly, traveling the world while tuition for students rises. ... Help me demand an e nd to this shameful waste.” 

The brochure reproduces several receipts from international locations made out by International Studies Director Jacob Ng and charged to the Peralta Community College District. All of the receipts reproduced appear to have 200 3 dates. 

The brochure also includes a petition supporting Hodge’s campaign to establish “strict controls on all travel and related spending” for the department, which Hodge asks residents to sign and mail to Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris.  

Part of the job of Peralta’s international office is to recruit students to the district from other countries. International students pay a higher tuition to the district than students who live in Peralta’s service area, and the money obtained from international stu dents goes directly to the district. In-district student tuition is funneled through the state, which withholds some of the amount before sending it to Peralta. 

Responding to Hodge’s charges, Peralta Public Information Officer Jeff Heyman said that “we f eel that these are events that happened in the past. They were looked into, and worked on. We’ve done our duty. The issue isn’t relevant any longer.” 

And Peralta Federation of Teachers President Michael Mills said that “we think that the travel element o f this office has been thoroughly reviewed.” Mills said the PFT is working with the district on a “review of the content of the program to determine how we can maximize its potential.” 

The information contained in the Hodge brochure are a reprisal of charges the first-term trustee originally made at a September 13 Peralta Trustee meeting, which ended in a virtual shouting match between Hodge and Trustee President William Riley when he tried to limit her remarks. Trustees later rejected Hodge’s motion to eliminate the International and Global Education Department outright. 

Hodge’s sister Nichole, an Oakland attorney, told trustees that she had made a written request to Chancellor Harris last spring “asking for records of foreign students who actually came to the Peralta Colleges as a direct result of the recruiting efforts” by the International and Global Education Department. Nichole Hodge said she received a letter from the district in June stating that “Peralta does not have such records.” 

Hodge had requested that Ng attend that Sept. 13 meeting to answer her concerns about the department, and was visibly angered when Ng did not show up. Instead, Ng’s report was given by his supervisor—Peralta Vice Chancellor Margaret Haig—who had only been on the jo b four days before the meeting. 

Hodge said that she had directed her sister to send the letter to Harris concerning what she called “this so-called office,” and charged that Ng “has racked up thousands of dollars traveling around the world and nobody can tell me how many students have been recruited. How can we justify cutting classes and salaries and then send this man around the world?” 

And after Riley cautioned Hodge about making personal attacks against an employee, Hodge said that she would ask Ng himself the questions, but he was not at the meeting as she had requested. 

“Is there some kind of coverup or something illegal going on?” she asked. 

In her report to the Sept. 13 meeting, Vice Chancellor Haig said that it was her intention to “conduct a review of the international education office, including the finances and the mission of the office,” but that she hadn’t been on the job long enough to be able to answer questions. 

Trustees Cy Gulassa and Bill Withrow both agreed with Hodge’s concerns a bout the International and Global Education Department, but specifically rejected her call to abolish it. 

Criticizing a report sent in by Ng through Vice Chancellor Haig as “unacceptable to someone who’s trying to understand what’s going on in this progr am,” Gulassa said “we need to learn the plain facts. If you’ve gone to Bangkok, let us know how many students later came to Peralta from Bangkok. And if you can’t answer that, maybe you shouldn’t be going to Bangkok.” 

Gulassa added that “I’m not advocati ng any closure of this office. We just want an accurate accounting.” 

Withrow, one of the trustees who has demanded increased fiscal accountability from the district in other areas, said that “while there is concern about this program in the community; it’s been shrouded in secrecy and there has been a lack of data.” He noted that the international office was bringing in a net of $2.2 million to the district while operating on a $470,000 budget. 

“Whether or not the program money is being spent efficientl y, if we do away with this program, we are going to have to identify $2.2 million in the budget that we will have to cut,” he said. “This is not a game. We need to take a look at this program, but we need to approach it from a focused, business standpoint.” 

Hodge has said she will not think about any plans to run for the City Council against first-term Councilmember Brooks, but De La Fuente said that he was approached earlier this year by Hodge and her brother, asking for De La Fuente’s support in a run for the 6th District Council seat. 

Last month, the Oakland Tribune reported that De La Fuente sponsored a fund-raiser for Hodge in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, with the newspaper indicating that Hodge would use the proceeds “to send newsletters to her constituents to keep them updated on issues she’s facing as a trustee.” 

“In fact,” the Tribune article concluded, “Hodge said her first letter would continue to demand answers to questions about the way Peralta’s international student program is operated.”›

Were drums of radioactive waste from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory buried in South Richmond? 

A multi-jurisidictional investigation to determine just that is now being launched after a survey detected buried metal where a retired UC Berkeley worker said he helped bury the drums along the South Richmond shoreline. 

All parties caution that the presence of metal could be anything from hubcaps to scrap metal, and that only an excavation at the site will determine what is buried in the landfill. 

Rick Alcaraz, a retired groundskeeper at the university’s Richmond Field Station (RFS), said he and other workers made repeated trips to the laboratory in the late 1960s to collect heavy 55-gallon drums. 

He said they dumped the containers in the landfil l at a site where confirmation of the presence of submerged metal at the site was made on Aug. 18 by a UC Berkeley crew who surveyed the area with a magnetometer. 

The discovery was disclosed in a status report released last week by Barbara J. Cook, the B erkeley-based chief of Northern California coastal cleanup for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). 

There was a delay between Alcaraz’s report and the survey because of uncertainty about which jurisdiction owned the site. 

The owner t urned out to be the City of Richmond Redevelopment Agency, which subsequently granted authorization for the UC Berkeley survey.  

“We’re the lead agency,” Ron Baker, Sacramento-based chief of the DTSC’s information office, said Monday. 

“We are aware of t hose allegations and we are in the process of looking into them,” he said. “We fully intend to go out and look at this.” 

Baker said the investigation would include the Radiological Health Branch of the state Department of Health Services, which has the m ission “to enhance and protect public health, safety, and environmental quality in California by regulating the use of and exposure to radiation.” 

Cook said Monday that the DTSC will be using LFR-Levine Fricke, which has the cleanup contracts for the RFS and adjoining Campus Bay sites, to conduct a thorough examination of the site, hopefully concluding by the end of the month. 

Alcaraz said he reported the incident because he was afraid that when the drums were exposed, children and others might experien ce what happened to him when he opened one of the drums and examined some of the rocks he found inside. 

Alcaraz said that later that evening, “I began to bleed from my eyes, ears and nose, and my feet swelled up. I don’t want that happening to anyone els e.” 

Treated at Brookside Hospital at the time, Alcaraz said he was told that his symptoms were caused by an allergic reaction to the eucalyptus trees at RFS. 

“I don’t believe it,” he said. 

The disposal site is just to the northeast of the field station, one of several sites along the Stege Marsh shoreline which were heavily contaminated by a century of chemical manufacturing. 

The field station and the adjoining Campus Bay site, where a development combine hopes to install 1,330 units of housing atop a massive mound of buried hazardous waste, were transferred from the jurisdiction of the Regional Water Quality Control Board to the DTSC earlier this year after protests and a campaign by area activists. 

Cook said Monday that the excavation will be done cautiously and in coordination with a variety of agencies that have jurisdiction over waterfront activities 

Among the agencies that the DTSC is keeping informed are the Richmond Redevelopment Agency, which owns the site, the Bay Conservation and Developm ent Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the state Department of Fish and Game, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

The U.S. Department of Energy, which runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab oratory, is not involved at this point because the agency has no record of drums being disposed of at the site, Cook said. 

Cook told a gathering of the Community Advisory Group that is offering guidance to her staff on toxic sites in the South Richmond a rea that the core drilling normally used to detect the presence of underground contaminants couldn’t be utilized for fear that something hazardous might be released from a buried drum. 

Cook said Monday that the site would have to be excavated layer by la yer in a process similar to an archaeological dig, with crews removing two feet of soil, then gathering further magnetometer readings and testing for volatile organic toxins, followed by another two-foot slice with more testing, and so on. 

Leah Brooks, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health Services in Sacramento, said her agency will be involved as well if radioactive waste is discovered, with the DTSC serving as the lead agency. 

Brooks’ agency has clear responsibilities in all cases where p otential radiological health risks are involved, said the DTSC’s Baker. 

Sherry Padgett, a spokesperson for Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development (BARRD), which has been the most visible organization in challenging development at the polluted sites, said she had mixed feelings about the news. 

“If you’re sitting in an auditorium and you smell smoke, it could mean a fire—or it could mean that someone’s just lit a cigarette,” she said. “The best of all cases would be that nothing comes of it. It’s just some buried metal. But if it turns out to be something else...” 

The East Bay’s self-styled “social capitalist” organization Rubicon Programs officially opens in Berkeley Thursday morning with a celebration at its downtown offices. 

The ribbon-cutting ceremony and office tour will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. at the organization’s new Berkeley offices at 1918 Bonita Ave. NBC 11 television reporter Christien Kafton, a Berkeley native, will serve as master of ceremonies for the event, with Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson serving as honorary hosts. 

The organization has been operating its Berkeley satellite office since July of this year. 

Based in Richmond, the 32-year-old social service organization provides what Vice President Jane Fischberg describes as a “wide range of caree r development and housing services all across the Bay Area, primarily in the East Bay.” 

The organization’s website says that “each year, Rubicon helps over 3,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area—most of whom are homeless or living in poverty—get jobs, housing, legal support, and the skills they need to create better lives for themselves.” The website also notes that Rubicon “funds over 50 percent of our $15.3 million budget from revenues generated by our enterprises, fees from services, and rental pr operties.” 

The organization operates a bakery at its Richmond headquarters and operates what Fischberg calls a “high-end commercial landscaping operation” that in part handles all of the landscaping at Treasure Island. Fischberg said that Rubicon also pr ovides housing for 44 formerly homeless people at Treasure Island. 

Rubicon also operates legal aid and mental health care services. 

Fischberg says that the Berkeley office, with 16 employees, will provide services for residents of the cities of Berkeley, Albany, Emeryville, and Piedmont. 

“It will serve in part as a career center where prospective employees can meet with employers,” she said. “We will also provide networking assistance. And a big part of our mission will be to partner with the various p ublic agencies in the area that provide career and employment services.” 

The organization will also provide what Fischberg calls “intense services for people transitioning out of homelessness. We coordinate with landlords to provide permanent housing for the formerly homeless, and provide training and other services to help people retain that housing. We also provide special job training for formerly homeless people who have additional needs in finding and keeping employment.” 

The California Department of Rehabilitation will provide both funding for the office as well as deliver on-site services to the program participants. 

The organization’s Berkeley area work is also funded in part by the Workforce Investment Board, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Alameda County Social Services Department, and the Mental Health and Housing departments of the City of Berkeley.

Neighbors of the Berkeley Adult School (formerly Franklin School) planted the northeast corner of the site (Curtis and Virginia streets) on Saturday. Schoolhouse Creek Commons, which is allied with Partners-for-Parks, welcomes donations and assistance with the project. For more information, contact James Day at 559-8368 or dayork@infinex.com..

The Zoning Adjustments Board voted unanimously Thursday to declare Dwight Way Liquors a public nuisance and to order its closure. 

The decision pleased the 30-plus area residents who attended the meeting. 

The resolution adopted by the board cited a long litany of complaints from neighbors and police against the shop at 2440 Sacramento St., including—between August 2004 and September of this year—32 violations of the store’s liquor license and 34 calls for police service at the site. 

Complaints from neighbors included discoveries of empty fortified wine bottles, needles and other drug paraphernalia in their yards, noise, public urination, liquor sales to minors, indecent exposure, drug sales and other problematic behavior by the store’s customers. 

Addulazziz Saleh Saleh, the current liquor license holder, didn’t appear to protest the decision, which was passed unanimously by the board. 

The decision held that the store “is operated in such a manner as to constitute a public nuisance and orders the operation thereof to cease.” 

The decision can be appealed to the City Council. 

i

Dolores Huerta is coming to Berkeley this Friday to advocate against the School of the Americas where Latin American soldiers are trained in torture techniques. 

Huerta, a dynamic speaker who energizes her audiences, has no time for despair.  

Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union with Cesar Chavez, she is a life-long organizer and lobbyist. Huerta urged others to join her in the struggle. 

It is imperative for people to connect “their street politics with electoral politics,” she said, “otherwise our representative government is not going to work.” 

When she went to the Peace March in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, she said she wished that even a few of the people at the march would become full-time activists. 

“Of the 200,000 people there, if only 5,000 or even 1,000 would go up to [Capital Hill] and start lobbying, we could have stopped maybe the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court,” she said.  

A mother of 11, she advises people to set their priorities by finding something that is really important and do it before thinking of all the reasons they can’t. 

“If cleaning the house is going to have an impact 50 years from now, then clean your house,” she said. “If going out to that demonstration to change some policy is going to have a better impact, then definitely go to that demonstration.” 

Winner of the Puffin Foundation Award for Creative Citizenship in 2002, she poured her $100,00 grant from the award into creating the Dolores Huerta Foundation Organizing Institute. Her youngest daughter, Camila Chavez, is the executive director of the Bakersfield-based foundation. 

The institute is setting up training for people interested in working full-time as organizers. But already there is a paid staff organizing against Proposition 73, the “notify parents before abortion” measure on this November’s special election ballot. Huerta said the prominence of issues like women’s rights and gay rights is sometimes used to obfuscate the fact that corporations are taking over our government. 

Even at 75, Dolores Huerta is so politically active it is hard to catch up with her. 

She just received the Pace e Bene Award for non-violent activism this month, and on Friday she will be at Berkeley’s St. Joseph the Worker Church talking with Father Louie Vitale against the School of the Americas. This military school, funded by U.S. tax dollars, and which has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is responsible for deaths and disappearances throughout Latin America, Huerta said. 

“Every issue is interrelated,” she said. “What happens in Latin America affects what happens here. Father Louie Vitale and Father Bill O’Donnell have gone to prison over this issue. The United States should not be involved in training terrorists. This is a very just issue that people need to find out about.”  

Her own non-violent training began early, in the Catholic teaching of “turn the other cheek” and in reading about St. Francis and Gandhi. When her philosophy of non-violence met the reality of violence during the United Farm Workers’ strikes, Huerta said, it showed how effective the philosophy of non-violence was. 

“When we were on the picket lines, the growers came at us with violence and you saw the strikers were not violent, you saw how that really made the picket line stronger, it made the workers stronger,” she said. 

Even after being beaten by San Francisco police, she says her non-violent attitudes were reinforced.  

Huerta, who has negotiated several contracts for the U.F.W., offers advice to union negotiators, techniques she learned from people like Lou Goldblatt of the Longshoreman’s Union. 

She said, “First, when you negotiate you’re always honest both with the workers and the companies you’re bargaining with. Number two, the workers have to be involved in negotiations. A lot of people think you have to be an attorney to negotiate; you don’t have to be. Then, always be reasonable and try to come to a common agreement with the employer, not to make it contentious.” 

Huerta said she avoids feeling discouraged by looking for the good that can come out of something bad. 

“Katrina was a horrible disaster in terms of the people that got killed, but it is certainly showing the true face of our government in such a stark way, even those who had some confidence in this government are now starting to question it,” she said.  

After being very ill, Huerta says she has regained energy very slowly. Yet, as she speaks, she fulfills what her grandfather said of her, that she must have seven tongues because she speaks so fast. An unflagging organizer, she brings her audiences along with her, translating English to Spanish, urging agreement. 

With one fist raised in solidarity, she calls out “Si, Se Puede”—“Yes, We Can.” 

Dolores Huerta is scheduled to be at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St., Friday, Nov. 4, at 7 p.m. for a conversation with Father Louie Vitale regarding the School of the Americas.›

Prosecutors have filed felony charges against the 46-year-old Oakland man whose car ran a red light and killed a 20-year-old UC Berkeley student at about 2:30 a.m. Thursday. 

Christine Phan Dao died in the crash after her car was struck by a vehicle driven by Kenneth Ray Wheeler as he drove north on San Pablo Avenue at the University Avenue intersection. 

Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Joe Okies said Wheeler was charged with running a red light and a variety of other intoxication and driving counts under the California Vehicle Code. 

Wheeler was transferred to the Alameda County Jail after he was treated for injuries at Highland Hospital. 

Because of incorrect information received for the Oct. 28 paper, the Daily Planet reported that Ms. Dao was riding a motorcycle. She was, in fact, driving a car. 

Wheeler was driving a Ford Mustang, Okies said. 

—

Gunshot 

Someone capped off a round near the corner of Ellis and Fairview streets shortly after midnight Thursday. No one was injured, Okies said. 

Strong-arm heist 

A 15-year-old was robbed of his valuables near the corner of Allston Way and Martin Luther King Jr. Way just after 3 p.m. Thursday. The robber was a big fellow between 17 and 20 years of age and standing about 6’3”. 

Rape averted 

A 47-year-old woman narrowly averted rape after a man grabbed her as she walked into an alleyway in the 2000 block of Shattuck Avenue at 9:20 a.m. Friday, Okies said. 

The victim described her assailant an a bald African American man in his early 20s who stands about 6’3” and weighs about 180 pounds. 

He was wearing a dark baseball cap, a dark zip-up sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. Anyone with information about the crime is requested to contact the department at police@ci.berkeley.ca.us orthe department’s Sex Crimes detail at 981-5735. 

Callers may remain anonymous. 

iPod ear-jacking 

Three teenagers staged a strong-arm robbery of a Berkeley man who was walking along the 2000 block of Allston Way at 4:25 p.m. Thursday. 

Their loot? The earpieces through which their victim was listening to the sounds of his iPod MP3 player. 

Police arrived in time to apprehend the miscreants and recover the listening gear. 

Stomping busts 

Police arrested four suspects on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and battery after they stomped a 31-year-old man in the 3000 block of Shattuck Avenue shortly before 5:30 Friday afternoon. 

The victim, who was later treated at a hospital emergency room, was able to describe the red vehicle in which his assailants had fled and officers arrested them moments later. 

Sex grab arrest 

A 21-year-old woman flagged down a police car moments after a man had groped her as she walked along the 2400 block of Haste Street. The officers were able to quickly locate and arrest the 21-year-old man the victim identified. 

He was booked on suspicion of sexual battery. 

Bizarre robbers 

A man in a bathrobe and accompanied by four would-be felons clad in more traditional garb approached a man in his car in the 2500 block of Park Street and asked for money at 3 a.m. Saturday. 

When the driver refused, the odd assemblage began pounding on his window. The driver and his car escaped, possessions intact. 

Hallo-weenies 

The seasonal counterparts of the Grinch made off with two pumpkins a resident of the 700 block of Contra Costa Avenue had on display outside his home Saturday morning. 

The three gourdnappers were last seen departing the scene of the crime in a white Monte Carlo, said Officer Okies. 

Party-bashers 

A group of young men drove to the 2600 block of Regent Street at 11:21 p.m. Saturday and attempted to crash a party then under way. 

In the course of their efforts, one of the group bashed one of the legitimate revelers over the head with a bottle before the group fled the scene. 

Armed robbery 

Two men robbed a 38-year-old man of his cash, laptop computer and other belongings near the corner of Cedar and Franklin streets just before 9:45 p.m. Sunday, then fled in late model American car. c

To view Justin DeFreitas’ latest editorial cartoon, please visit  

www.jfdefreitas.com To search for previous cartoons by date of publication, click on the Daily Planet Archive.



VOTE! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A large margin is needed to “Nix the First Six” Nov. 8. 

The evidence is overwhelming that the 2004 election was stolen by the Republicans, in part via manipulation of electronic voting data. The Nov. 8 special election, with its Republican agenda for California, is a prime target for more of the same. So, we not only need a majority of votes to defeat the Governator’s destructive power-grab, we need a large enough margin to make it impossible to fraudulently tip the election. 

Remember: Make sure to vote, and make sure your friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers, etc. vote to “nix the first six” on Nov. 8. 

Diane Shavelson 

• 

WAG THE DOG 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One, among many positive things, that may result from the Scooter Libby indictment is that Bush wont dare to start another war ... hopefully. But then think about it, he’s in such deep doo-doo that it may be his only way to refocus our attention away from his corrupt administration I remember that movie Wag the Dog, in which Karl Rove types are brought in to stave off a White House scandal and the solution is to go to war. Bush’s track record on phony war is 100 percent; flushed with success he may try again.  

Robert Blau  

• 

SOUTH BERKELEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

More than any other issue it has been the inability to deal seriously with crime than has kept progressives at the sidelines of American politics. Hence it is depressing but not unexpected that Kriss Worthington’s response to soaring crime in his district is to change the map index to mask the crime rate. Serious leadership would require deploying police to penalize and then sell the infamous drug house under the penal code as a locus of criminal conspiracy, petition the university to end People’s Park as a vector of South Berkeley’s woe, and reclaim Telegraph Avenue as a thriving and safe commercial hub for the university community. South Berkeley deserves better leadership.  

David Baggins 

• 

APOLOGISTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I lived on Oregon Street in 1989 one block from the Moore family. There was a lot of trouble in the neighborhood ... drugs, burglary, prostitution, intimidation and violence. The Moore household was one locus of problems then. 

Sixteen years have passed, 16 years of neighborhood efforts to make a peaceful and civilized life and yet the problems remain. 

I remember feeling abandoned by the city as I was compelled to enclose my yard, install security lights, and constantly be on the watch. My porch was set on fire, my house broken into and I was assailed at knifepoint. My neighbors—African American, Hispanic, Pakastani and white—had similar problems.  

It is not a question of race but a question of civility. The first right one has is the simple right to live without fear. The government’s first role, as an extension of the collective will, is to provide basic peace and safety.  

It is astounding how impotent the City of Berkeley and its agencies have been. Perhaps they fear those like Osha Neumann, apologists for uncivilized behavior—because their apologies are wrapped in politically correct language. Or perhaps Berkeley, still blinded by “progressive” ideology, is unable to simply say: “People are responsible for their own actions. If one cannot behave in a civilized manner then one can’t live here.”  

The suit against the Moores is a suit on behalf of all of us. It is filed against disorder, threat and violence—filed on behalf of civility, thoughtfulness and peace. I wish Paul Rauber, Laura Menard and all other brave citizens the best of luck. 

John Koenigshofer 

• 

ENOUGH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have been following the case of Lenora Moore with great interest. Charges of racial intolerance, racial discrimination, gentrification and class bias have flown fast and furious. Enough is enough. The issue here has absolutely nothing to do with race, class or gentrification.  

Our homes are our sanctuary for our families. Regardless of race or class, we have the right to the safe and peaceful enjoyment of our homes. Remember the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Paul Rauber and others near Mrs. Moore have had that right repeatedly violated for too long.  

For better or worse, Mrs. Moore is the magnet that continues to attract those who have no respect for community. Nobody, regardless of race or class, wants the byproducts of drug dealing which often include: endless streams of traffic; increased property crimes; vandalism and graffiti; litter; dangerous pit bulls roaming the streets; young thugs hanging out on the street drinking 40-ouncers; and blight. I know. I live in the North Oakland-South Berkeley border area. Drug dealing is the number one concern. One drug house can wreak havoc for a whole neighborhood and keep residents in constant fear.  

Recently, a drug house just down the street from me was shut down by the Berkeley Swat Team. Since then, we have witnessed a dramatic difference in our neighborhood. I do agree with Daily Planet Executive Editor that the Berkeley and Oakland Police Departments must be more aggressive in addressing crime in the North Oakland-South Berkeley border area with more frequent patrols. The City of Berkeley and Oakland must also play a stronger role in proactively dealing with issues of blight. Residents also need to step up and play an active role in community policing. I applaud Paul Rauber and others for stepping up and trying to reclaim their homes as a sanctuary. Forcing Mrs. Moore to move through a small claims nuisance suit won’t eliminate crime in the South Berkeley area, but it is certainly a step in the right direction and will dramatically improve the lives of those living near her. Apologists for Mrs. Moore are misguided. They should try living next to a drug house.  

Jeffrey G. Jensen 

Oakland 

• 

B.S. ARTISTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wholeheartedly agree with every word of Paul Rauber’s commentary (“South Berkeley’s Crime Enablers,” Oct. 28) and sympathize with the horrible ordeal he and his family have been subjected to. And I think the overwhelming majority of Berkeley citizens agree with me when I say: We are sick to death of these useless B.S. artists who have nothing better to do than to muddle the issue by playing the same old useless “race card” that we’ve already heard a thousand times before, that has nothing to do with the real issue of trying to deal with these violent maniacs—of whatever race—who are in the process of ruining our neighborhoods.  

Ace Backwords 

• 

BLOATED WORK FORCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Michael Marchant’s defense of city workers (Oct. 28) is informative and reasonable, but misses an essential point. No one would deprive competent, productive workers of a reasonable income, retirement, or health care. But Berkeley is burdened with workers who are flakey at best and obstructionist at worst, spreading the workload as thin as possible in order to pad their departments with ever more friends and relatives. If the least productive 25 percent of the work force were laid off, the rest could run the city efficiently. That is why our work force is more bloated and costly than that of any other city in the East Bay. 

Jerry Landis 

• 

REMEMBERING ROSA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Usually I enjoy reading J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s columns, but I was very disappointed in his Oct. 28 effort on Rosa Parks. 

I don’t know the sources of Allen-Taylor’s information, but interviews with Mrs. Parks and others who were in Montgomery at the time contradict his premises that the Dec. 1 1955 event was staged, and that the consequent boycott was not spontaneous. 

It is true that Mrs. Parks and her husband had been actively involved in the NAACP. It is also true that prior to Mrs. Parks, other African-Americans with less admirable qualities had been arrested for refusing to give up their seats. But there was no plan for Rosa Parks to resist that particular day. The situation arose, and Mrs. Parks simply took a moral stand against something she knew was not right. 

Likewise, there was no pre-planning of the bus boycott which followed Mrs. Parks’ arrest. In fact, it started as a one-day reaction, and the success of that one day inspired what turned into a year-long boycott. 

It is also true that many heroes accomplished great deeds before Rosa Parks existed, and many more will rise to the occasion in the future. But we must not diminish the impact this courageous woman had on our country and abroad. Oppressed people around the world have been and can be inspired by Mrs. Parks’ act of resistance. She deserves every bit of respect and recognition she has earned. 

I have found some of Allen-Taylor’s data questionable in the past, but now I know for sure to take his column with a grain of salt. 

Mary Hill  

Richmond 

• 

CALCULATED STRATEGY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks to J. Douglas Allen-Taylor for his excellent “Rosa Parks is Not the Beginning of the Story” (Oct. 28). It is vital to point out that Rosa Parks was not just the little lady on the bus who was too tired to give up her seat to a white man, but an actor in a carefully planned and calculated strategy to fight racial injustice. Allen-Taylor rightly insists that many people took part in many courageous acts over a period of many years, building carefully the movement that most honors 20th-century America. I first learned of Septima Clark in the 1980s, when I read Ready From Within, an as-told-to autobiography, written by Berkeley author/educator Cynthia Brown, condensed from many hours of interview tapes with Septima Clark, and approved by Clark. It’s still worth reading, if you can find it: short, unpretentious, straightforward, focussed, and smart, as Ms. Clark and all the people she credits had to be. Stories like hers remind us that to reform society we need more than passion; we need sustained, thoughtful planning; cooperation with folks we may often disagree with or even dislike; open minds ready to learn from whatever source; and the ability to stick it out for the long haul, without caring about who gets the credit. 

I’m grateful to Allen-Taylor for reminding us of what true heroism is.  

Dorothy Bryant 

• 

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It really depends on which Norman LaForce you choose to believe. The one who makes statements in public and on record, or the one that denies them. 

In the Aug. 17 2004 edition of the Daily Planet the report goes “The Sierra Club’s Norman LaForce floated the organization’s own plans for the race track site, contrasting Magna’s proposal (which was for 600,000 square feet) with the (Sierra) club’s proposal for a much smaller 325,000-square-foot hotel and shopping area—which would include ballfields at the base of Gilman Street.” 

Norman is on record as one of the most forceful opponents of off-leash dog parks and in his response refers to the already heavily overused Point Isabel. However dogwalkers and artists at the Albany Landfill attempted to have meaningful discussions with LaForce and the State Park Planners and were rebuffed at every turn. Norman did at one point tell me privately that he “could save the art” as long as Albany Let It Be would abandon their commitment to protecting 20 years of responsible off-leash access at the Albany Waterfront. 

This visceral dislike of dogs and the people who love them is partly what prompted Norman and Mayor Tom Bates to have a meeting with Jean Siri, our exemplary area representative on the board of East Bay Regional Park District, and suggest that perhaps she was getting a little old for the job and perhaps a younger man, LaForce, might be better in the post. This led to Jean’s public comment, reported in the media, that Berkeley’s mayor was both ageist and sexist. 

Most politicians fearing the loss of Sierra Club votes are pretty much held to LaForce’s way or no way. He has said to more than one listener that wildlife values trump human needs. LaForce is a lawyer who defends the insurance industry against claims by little humans like you and me.  

Draw your own conclusions.  

Jill Posener 

• 

MISSION STATEMENTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Berkeley taxpayers and Berkeley Public Library management, employees and patrons need to be aware of these statements: 

Berkeley Public Library Mission Statement 

• The Berkeley Public Library supports the individual’s right to know by providing free access to information. 

• The Central Library and four neighborhood Branch Libraries are committed to developing collections, resources, and services that meet the cultural, informational, recreational, and educational needs of Berkeley’s diverse, multi-cultural community.  

• The Library supports independent learning, personal growth, and the individual’s need for information.  

• Helpful and expert staff welcome the opportunity to provide quality library services and programs.  

• The Berkeley Public Library—an institution shaped by Berkeley’s traditions, characteristics, and environment—belongs to the entire community.  

—Adopted by the Board of Library Trustees December 1987 

The Board of Library Trustees Mission Statement 

Charged with management and control of the Berkeley Public Library under Section 30 of the Charter. Formulates major policies and long-range plans for the Library. Four members are appointed by the Council for a term of four years. The fifth member is a Councilmember, also appointed by the Council, whose term expires on December 1 of the year their term expires.  

City of Berkeley Mission Statement 

As City of Berkeley employees, our mission is to provide quality service to our diverse community; promote an accessible, safe, healthy, environmentally sound and culturally rich city; initiate innovative solutions; embrace respectful, democratic participation; respond quickly and effectively to neighborhood and commercial concerns and do so in a fiscally sound manner. 

These statements are hollow at the Berkeley Public Library when teen services are reduced at the branch libraries; award-winning and long-running programs are cut; RFID is installed without a public hearing; and from what I hear at public meetings, an environment that is rife with distrust, retaliations, and unsafe work practices.  

Jack Corviday 

• 

BERKELEY HONDA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’m going to make a prediction: The next person who asks Berkeley Honda for her car repair records will be unable to obtain them because the printer will be broken. Nor will she be able to receive her records via fax, directly from the computer, because the printers are “too old” to accommodate that function. Management will be sorry for the inconvenience, but perhaps the customer can try again next week? 

That is what’s been happening for the last several weeks to customers who want to pull their records from Berkeley Honda in order to establish a relationship with another car repair shop. The printer is always broken. And yet their printer has no difficulty spitting out work orders and bills. 

Now I’ll make another prediction: As soon as Berkeley Honda reads this letter, their printer will become fully functional again. Anyone want to make a little bet on that? 

Judy Shelton 

Berkeley Honda Labor and Community Coalition 

• 

PROPOSITION 73 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In California, small-minded men, Republicans and anti-abortionists, have commandeered the initiative process, much like Gov. Schwarzenegger has, to bring us Proposition 73. Prop. 73 is an abomination, a farcical exploitation, concocted by an immoral minority of religious extremists who are trying to force parental notification and their anti-abortion viewpoint on the majority of Californians.  

Republicans, hardcore conservatives and religious right-wingers would like nothing better than to have you to sit at home on your duffs Nov. 8. Low voter turnout favors their abuse of power and misuse of the election process. 

Prop. 73 is a stealth, anti-abortion propaganda tool. Follow the money; look who’s sponsoring it. Anti-abortionists of all stripes and colors, fundamentalists, religious right-wingers, evangelicals. What does that tell you? 

Vote no on 73. Say No to Schwarzenegger and send a message to religious zealots and ultraconservatives alike. And after the election ask the governor why he wasted $50 million dollars of taxpayer monies on a special election.  

Ron Lowe 

Nevada City 

• 

THE TWO Rs 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Rumsfeld and Rice are in charge of representing our country to the world. This duo, a septuagenarian career insider and a young super-achieving ingénue, perform impossible tasks with the nimbleness of acrobats and the dexterity of jugglers. Each can hold firm to incompatible positions as if balanced on more than two feet in order to shift when the rationale supporting their stance disappears.  

Rumsfeld, following orders, invaded Iraq with “shock and awe” but with insufficient personnel, handles a quagmire as a mere “long, hard slog” and now extols Iraq’s burgeoning democracy, a window dressing necessary to deflect attention from pointless and horrendous slaughter. He tells China to halt its military expansion and at the same time he encourages development of his own “bunker busters.”  

Rice doesn’t hesitate to tell other nations what to do—China must free market its currency; Syria must punish the assassins of Lebanon’s former prime minister; Iraq and Afghanistan must separate church from state and guarantee universal suffrage. She tells the Senate that the effort to rebuild Iraq ought to be infused with the same spirit that rebuilt Germany and Japan despite the fact that invading Iraq was a war of choice and lasted less than two months while World War II was forced upon us and lasted four years. She interrupts her diplomatic efforts to polish her image using gender and skin color, like make-up, to identify with three martyred girls in Birmingham half a century ago and with death and misery in New Orleans initiated by Hurricane Katrina.  

The two Rs do nothing to restore the admiration our country once enjoyed because the country they represent has rejected the ideals that merited admiration. It is not the country we want. 

Marvin Chachere 

San Pablo 

ƒ

In the morning, before anyone is awake, I go downstairs and make coffee. From the living room I hear the pop and bubble of my husband’s oxygen machine. In the kitchen I feel the cold, uneven, sticky floorboards under my bare feet and I am annoyed. 

At some point the boards will need to be replaced, and not just these individual boards, but the entire kitchen floor because it’s beginning to show signs of stress. We don’t have the money to buy new flooring, but when we have to replace it, what should we replace it with? 

Ralph’s wheelchair is heavy and damaging. It puts holes in the plaster and drywall, it breaks cabinet windows, shoves the stove out of alignment, knocks lamps and pictures and what-nots off shelves. Area rugs are a liability (the wheelchair chews them up), and wall-to-wall carpeting is not an option for a kitchen in constant use by a house full of first-class slobs. 

Tile won’t work because it sometimes cracks, and because in-between tile grout cleaning is not my forte. We should purchase linoleum, real battleship linoleum, made from linseed oil and other stuff, not the fake linoleum that comes in long, fat rolls, made to mimic tile, but doesn’t actually look or act the least bit like tile. Glued down with gummy adhesive, the wear and tear of an electric wheelchair will cause it to split, rip, and roll up at the corners. But real linoleum is expensive, and its shiny, seemingly benign, clean surface reminds me of hospital hallways, ER, ICU and Dr. X’s office where we go once a month to have the tube inserted in Ralph’s bladder replaced. 

I so don’t want to be reminded of Kaiser Permanente’s Urology Department in the morning when I’m waiting for the coffeemaker to finish its job. 

I stare at the hissing plastic and glass machine and because I’m desperate to get away from the uneven floor and thoughts of doctors and medical emergencies, I do what I always do: I pour myself a small cup of coffee even though it isn’t finished percolating. 

One of these days I will need to learn how to use the autotimer on the coffeemaker so the coffee will be done before I come downstairs. But that won’t happen in a million years, like me cleaning grout, or learning the different functions on my digital camera, or how to use the text messaging feature on the cell phone. 

I sip the coffee. It isn’t hot, and the flavor tastes sharp, acidic, and bitter. 

I go upstairs and find my slippers, slip them on, and return to the kitchen for more coffee. Now I can’t feel the uneven boards beneath my feet. I fill my mug and enter the dining room where I look up and admire the newly plastered ceiling, work done by our neighbor, Tondre. 

With the ceiling no longer full of holes and cracks and hanging chads of plaster, I vow to spend less time looking down and complaining about the uneven kitchen floorboards, and more time looking up, thankful for no water stains, fissures, or views of the upstairs bathroom pipes; grateful for a floor beneath my feet, and a permanent roof above my head. 

After reading Paul Rauber’s commentary “South Berkeley’s Crime Enablers,” I feel sure that he misunderstood my opinion piece. Mr. Rauber refers to my “venomous Oct. 25 commentary” accuses me of “tossing around incendiary” charges of racism and then concludes by saying that my opinions “Make a firebomb look kind of benign by comparison.” Mr. Rauber’s choice of language and metaphor suggests that by merely raising the question of racism, I have somehow caused a harm comparable to the destruction of a firebomb. This is a surprising repudiation of the value of free expression coming from a man who makes his living as a writer. 

Mr. Rauber, I know that your situation is difficult. It is difficult for many of us. I have been held up at gunpoint in my neighborhood by teenagers. It isn’t pretty. Poverty, crime, lack of education and opportunity all conspire to make life hard for many of us. There is tremendous suffering in South Berkeley that goes unaddressed year after year. This is the reality that much of Berkeley seems determined to ignore. 

As naïve as this may sound, I really was hoping that we could work toward solutions if we involve the actual people with whom you have a conflict, identify what help the city is prepared to offer, and let go of the requirement that Ms. Moore sell her home as a prerequisite to the mediation. We need to look at the root causes of the conflict. This is not your responsibility nor is it Ms. Moore’s alone. The City of Berkeley and all of its residents have a responsibility to address poverty issues and the underlying causes of street level crime. We have neglected our young people and ignored the income gap in our city for too long and at our own peril. 

Mr. Rauber, please be assured that I had no “venom” in my heart when I wrote my article. My point was to encourage us to see Lenora Moore’s situation in its historical context. Looking at the bigger picture is not meant to minimize your suffering. It is meant to help us correctly diagnose a social problem so that we can create real solutions. Your group seems to be blaming Ms. Moore because it is convenient to do so, not because you really believe that she is the problem. 

Mr. Rauber, by bringing up the issue of institutional racism in Berkeley, I didn’t mean to imply that you were practicing racism. However, you can’t deny that gentrification is taking place right before our very eyes. The number of African Americans in Berkeley has declined steadily from a high of 30 percent in the ‘60s to our current level of 13 percent. African Americans in Berkeley live an average of 10 years less than white residents. They are also four times as likely to be stopped by police and profiled than white people in Berkeley. The “achievement gap” in high school education continues to impair the ability of our young people of color to compete for the kinds of jobs that would enable them to remain in Berkeley. Mr. Rauber, can you really believe that the legacy of racism and current economic conditions play no part in this situation and put no pressure on young people to participate in the underground economy ? 

By the way, I would like to remind you that I went to court with Ms. Moore in 1992 and am well aware of the problems in your neighborhood. I read the entire case that your group presented to Ms. Moore and tried to help her formulate a response. Be assured that I would love to meet with you and/or your group to discuss the root causes of the drug problem in Berkeley and how we can organize to address it.  

However, I find it a bit alarming that simply raising difficult questions about racism and the complexity of justice is enough to get me branded by you as a race-baiter and a crime-enabler. Even worse, my words actually inspired one of the plaintiffs to contact my place of work to complain that I had “encouraged” young people to commit criminal acts. I don’t know how you folks found out where I work, but I would hope that as the lead plaintiff you would encourage the others not to harass me at my job. 

Maybe your group will win in court. Maybe the judge will blame Ms. Moore for not being more aggressive in the fight against street crime. However, there are other grandmothers out there. I can point to numerous examples of grandmothers who are struggling to raise their grandchildren and to keep them away from the drug culture. What if we just go ahead and move all those grandmothers right out of Berkeley, too? Maybe we can pressure them to sell their homes, too. Surely we can replace them with some nice, young couples who are looking to get into the housing market through the purchase of an old “fixer upper.” And yes, Mr. Rauber, if we fail to look at the systemic causes of drug addiction, crime and poverty, then when those newcomers apply their fresh coats of paint, they might as well just paint over the history of African Americans in Berkeley, too. 

Andrea Prichett is a member of CopWatch and a South Berkeley resident.›

It’s me again, lead plaintiff for the 14 South Berkeley citizens suing our South Berkeley drug house, responding to the latest distortions of our case in the editorial pages of the Daily Planet. In her Oct. 28 editorial, Executive Editor Becky O’Malley’s paints us ordinary neighborhood folks as vindictive harpies “with blood in their eyes” intent on unconstitutional punishment of Lenora Moore, owner of the drug house at 1610 Oregon Street. “If anyone . . . has broken a criminal law,” O’Malley asks, “shouldn’t they be charged and tried in accordance with the Constitution?” 

O’Malley is ignoring the difference between civil and criminal law. We are not charging Moore with a criminal infraction; we are making civil claims for the pain and suffering she has inflicted on our South Berkeley neighborhood by running an open drug house for many years. O’Malley claims that our “stated intent. . . is to force the defendant, a neighboring homeowner, to sell her property, whether she wants to or not.” This is false. Our intent is to collect cash damages from Moore. Before we filed our suit, we told her that if she would sell her house and leave the neighborhood, we would drop the action. She refused. Therefore we’re proceeding with our civil suit. Ms. Moore has allowed her house to be a public nuisance, and she owes her neighbors restitution for the open drug dealing, prostitution, casually discarded drug paraphernalia, and midnight fights her mismanagement of her property has inflicted on us. We all think it would be a fine thing if she would sell her property and move away, but that is not a penalty that small claims court can exact, nor that we can ask of it. 

O’Malley magnanimously allows that “No one should have to live in a neighborhood where criminal behavior is tolerated. But stopping criminal behavior should be the responsibility of the police, not of the small claims court, which can do nothing to stop real crimes.” In fact, we have been working closely with the police for many years. We keep our crime logs, call in drug deals we witness, identify violators of restraining orders, etc. But it hasn’t worked, largely because the Alameda County district attorney doesn’t take the matter seriously. Here’s a prime example: Recently, due to the hard work and good policing of the Berkeley Police Department, Lenora Moore’s daughter was arrested for possession of crack. Here was one of the worst actors in the neighborhood, finally in the hands of the criminal justice system. And what did the district attorney do? Gave her five years unsupervised probation. Now she’s back on the street, dealing as before. That’s why we’re pursuing a civil solution: It’s the only avenue left us. If Becky O’Malley is serious in her contention that we stick to purely criminal remedies, I look forward to her editorials in favor of stiff, mandatory sentences for those convicted of drug offenses. Until then, please allow us to deal with the situation as best we can. 

Finally, O’Malley calls us “dangerously naïve” for thinking that forcing Moore to move will stop drug dealing in our neighborhood. None of us is so deluded. However, it would stop a whole lot of drug dealing in our neighborhood, and I think we’d all be pretty darn happy with that. Surely O’Malley is not suggesting that since drug dealing is going to go on somewhere, it might as well be next door to us? That’s an easy argument to make for someone whose idea of a neighborhood nuisance is how high the sunflowers in her verge are allowed to grow.  

South Berkeley resident Paul Rauber is an editor at Sierra Magazine and a former columnist for East Bay Express.›

It had just started to drizzle and I had ducked under a freeway overpass to keep dry. I was tired from walking all day and sat down on a worn, discarded mattress. I looked around at bottles and trash strewn everywhere and a rat scurried near my foot. It was starting to get dark so I decided to take my chances in the rain. I headed out, not sure where I was going, hungry, getting cold and I had to go the bathroom. My cell phone rang. It was my wife. She was finally home! I had locked myself out and left my wallet home. Homeless for a day? No, I was keyless. 

There are many people we call homeless, who to me, are better described as keyless. They were born here, raised here and went to school here. They came home from Vietnam, played sports for the home team and to them for all extent and purpose they are home!  

I once interviewed a young man (18 years old) who was trying to get into a homeless shelter. He told me he was born and raised in Oakland, his parents live in Oakland, and he also had friends in the area. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Why did you rip your family off?” “How did you know that?” he asked. I told him, “When you have family and friends nearby, and you can only live with strangers, you must be doing something wrong. No one trusts you with keys!” 

Unfortunately the word homeless is too often being used as a noun, but keyless is still an adjective. We’ve moved from describing people as homeless, and are now calling them The Homeless. Recently the news media stopped calling victims of Hurricane Katrina homeless and referred to them as evacuees. 

Think about it! Many of the actions for which homeless and street people are derided, are the same things we do—sleeping, drinking, arguing, urinating. These are not aberrant behaviors! Most of us do the same thing everyday, but it’s behind closed doors. The difference is we have keys. 

Winston Burton is a Berkeley resident.l

“I sing the wrath of Achilles ...” If The Iliad doesn’t recount the fall of Troy so much as it does the seemingly endless war of attrition that preceded it, and of deeds of arms on the field, and vanity and wounded pride in the tents behind the lines—then Gary Graves’ Achilles and Patroklos (staged by Central Works at the Berkeley City Club) isn’t just a deliberately anachronistic parallel between Homeric heroics and the quagmire of occupation following the invasion of Iraq, as it is more an attempt to view the different facets of interpersonal experience as conditioned (and distorted) by an interminable war. 

Opening with the crash of waves over the inarticulate sound of whispering voices, a figure enters in the plain dark dress and covering mantle that have been worn by women in the Mediterranean and the Middle East for millennia. Then a G.I. in camouflage enters, on his helmet stenciled “Achilles” (Cole Smith) next to his pack of smokes, brandishing his automatic weapon. He challenges the woman, who approaches him from the shadows, announcing herself as Cassandra (Pamela Davis) with a warning that the gods intend his death in the war. 

He frisks her as she loudly protests, and tells her, “Your gods can kiss my ass.” 

This tone of deliberate anachronism and of bellicose cruelty and sharp, humorous non sequiters syncopates the dialogue and also gives the action a shaggy, vernacular texture. Cassandra starts declaiming something like Homer in prose, accusing Achilles with a list of the names “that go on and on” of those he’s killed. She has a fit, falling to the floor, as lanky, laconic Patroklos (Alex Klein), Achilles’ comrade-in-arms, stalks in to ask, “What’s wrong with her?”—“She’s a nut!”  

Cassandra has come out from the besieged city into the field of battle to warn Briseis (Jessica Camacho), another daughter of Troy’s King Priam, to return within the walls to safety. Achilles and Patroklos confront and kill Briseis’ husband offstage. Briseis tries to stab the Greek hero, who takes her and her country estate as spoils of war. And, as it develops, to Cassandra’s uncomprehending shock, Briseis likes the arrangement, garishly (and hysterically) illustrated by the most outrageous scene of the play, a kind of R&R romp of the two combat vets with their girl, very much a ménage-a-trois, as Achilles demonstrates when, cross-dressed and in a long blonde wig falling past his dark stubbled chin, he kisses Patroklos, who towers over him. 

The quick-change act of anachronism creates ambiguities: are Cassandra’s prophesying trances part of an act to get her own way? Do these slangy G.I.s really believe the archaisms they casually sling along with barracks talk, or are the quick epithets just throwaway clichés in deference to tradition? But like Fate—or the incongruous combinations of blasphemy and belief in magic spells—unlikely things come about that seem to carry the seal of divine will. Or are they from the desperate whims of shell-shocked, war-weary souls losing their grip? 

Agamemnon (Matthew Joseph), who has figured in a few salty remarks Achilles has made to Patroklos, arrives on the scene to recall the errant hero to the line of duty.  

The play’s at its best when the hybrid dialogue and action- run full-bore. When on message, the speeches become too expository, the strange tone that powers the play gets lost. Sometimes, the various strands that compose the unusual dialogue unravel, and things start sounding like a B-movie untempered by burlesque. In other moments, a narrative or rhetorical mode becomes a virtue: Patroklos’ Shade tells (and acts out for) Briseis of his death when he enters the fray in Achilles’ “equipment” to raise the spirit of the Greeks and scare the enemy.  

The indirectness of the presentation of combat only increases its effectiveness, putting the emphasis on its effects, not the sensation. As usual Central Works has assembled a good cast and displayed high production values. Christopher Herold’s direction creatively uses every inch of the stage, as well as offstage space, and designers Robert Ted Anderson, Tammy Berlin and Gregory Scharpen have lit, costumed and added the dimension of sound and music very well.  

As a play using deliberate anachronism, Achilles and Patroklos shows originality and application. There are moments when the waywardness of battle fatigue becomes a wayward presentation of the same, and story and theme are not so much advanced as added on through exposition. But as theater, this play’s an unusual addition to the “war is hell” dramatic literature, which stretches back 2,500 years to the Greeks themselves. And it’s a great deal more than that, as spectacle onstage. 

Central Works presents Achilles and Patroklos at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and at 5 p.m. Sunday through Nov. 5 at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. $9-$25. For more information, call 558-1381 or see www.centralworks.org. ›

TUESDAY, NOV. 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Trees: A Favorite Subject in Japanese Art” including works by Hoshi, Saito, Tanaka, Hasui and Sekino at the Scriptum-Schurman Gallery, 1659 San Pablo Ave. 524-0623. 

“New Works” by Andrea Voinot at North Berkeley Gallery, 1744 Shattuck Ave. 549-0428. 

THEATER 

Unconditional Theater “Swing State Stories” at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

FILM 

Alternative Visions: New York City: Four Shorts by Ernie Gehr at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Davy Rothbert reads from his short stories in “The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Margaret Cho explains why “I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50. 548-1761.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performs Schumann’s “Rhenich” Symphony at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$54. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Edessa, Balkan music, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singer’s Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Josh Workman, solo guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 2 

EXHIBTIONS 

“The Art of Metal” Jewelry, sculpture, and tableware by 73 California artists opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St.  

FILM 

The Unofficial Histories of Péter Forgács “The Bartos Family and Dusi and Jeno” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Candice Millard tells the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s trip up the Amazon in “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

St. Mark’s Choir at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Ellwsorth, Donations accepted. 845-0888. 

Concerto Competition at 7:30 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. tickets are $3-$10. 642-4864.  

Whiskey Brothers, Old Time and Bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Gerard Landry & The Lariats at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054.  

Eric Rangle & Orquestra America at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Teja Gerken, Claus Boesser-Ferrari, Adam Levy at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761.  

Calvin Keys Trio Invitational Jam at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

THURSDAY, NOV. 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco” guided tour at 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. 

THEATER 

“The Arab-Israeli Cookbook” a play by Robin Soans at 8 p.m., Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $22. 848-0237.  

Theater Rice Modern Asian American Theatre Showcase at 8 p.m. through Sat. at 155 Dwinelle UC Campus. Tickets are $2-$5.  

FILM 

Embracing Diversity Films “The Mexican Laborer” at 7 p.m. in the Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. 527-1328. 

The Unofficial Histories of Péter Forgács “The Maelstrom” at 5:30 p.m. and Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan at 7:30 at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ernesto Cardenal, poetry and conversation with the former Minister of Culture of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua at 6:30 p.m. at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 849-8232. 

“The American Self in Film” with David Thomson and Mike Katovich at 7:30 p.m. at College Prep School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 339-7726. www.college-prep.org/livetalk 

Deema Shehabi, Palestinian poet, at 7 p.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 16. 

Lunch Poems with California Poet Laureate, Al Young, at 12:10 p.m. at Morrison Library in Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137.  

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Richard Clarke introduces his first novel “The Scorpion’s Gate” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Walter Kirn introduces his novel of the American West “Mission to America” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Word Beat Reading Series with Julia Vinograd and Richard Silberg at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sarine Balian, jazz and traditonal Armenian songs, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

George Brooks & Shweta Jhaveri, new Indian jazz, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jazz Fourtet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. 841-JAZZ.  

Fishtank, Romainian, gypsy, flamenco at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

The Wailin’ Jennys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Casey Nell, Cas Lucas at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 .  

Terry Rodriguez, piano and Sheldon Browne, reeds, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

FRIDAY, NOV. 4 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley ”Six Degrees of Separation” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. through Nov. 19. Tickets are $10. 649-5999.  

Albany High School Theater Ensemble “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Albany High School Little Theater, 603 Key Route Blvd. 558-2500, ext. 2579. 

Berkeley Rep “Finn in the Underworld” opens at 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage and runs to Nov. 6. Tickets are $43-$59. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Achilles & Patroklos” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Nov. 20. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381.  

Impact Theatre “Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)” Thurs. through Sun. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 10. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468.  

Masquers Playhouse “Dear World” Jerry Herman’s musical, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through Dec. 17 at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Tickets are $15. 232-4031. www.masquers.org 

Youth Musical Theater Company “Sweeney Todd” Fri. and Sat. at 7:30 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m., also Nov. 10-12 at 7:30 p.m. at Longefellow Middle School Auditorium, 1500 Derby St. Tickets are $12, $6 students. 595-5514. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Oaktown: Art About Oakland and Our Communities” Reception at 7 p.m. at Women’s Cancer Resource Center, 5741 Telegraph Ave. 420-7900.  

Clint Imboden “6 x 6” six projects spanning six years. Reception at 6 p.m. at Lobot Gallery, 1800 Campbell St., Oakland. www.lobotgallery.com 

FILM 

The Battles of Sam Peckinpah “Ride the High Country” at 7 p.m., “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” at 9 p.m. at Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poems and Songs to the Dead with Cedric Brown, Barbara Heredia, Leticia Hernandez and others at 8 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Tenth and Oak Sts. 238-2200.  

Mary Roach reads from “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

University Chorus and Chamber Chorus at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 642-9988.  

Vera Breheda, piano, at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. Cost is $12-$15. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

Stone-Zimmerman Duo at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15. 701-1787. 

Moh Alileche & Danse Maghreb at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054.  

E.W. Wainwright’s African Roots of Jazz at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

De Rompe y Raja, Afro-Peruvian, at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568.  

Dre & Meghan Baker at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10.  

Houston Jones at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Battlefield Band at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

The Unravellers at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082.  

Tressa Armstrong, vocals, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Kirk Keeler & Cowpokes for Peace at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe. 595-5344.  

“... and Words by Barry Warren” a vocal jazz concert at at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

Shotgun Wedding Quintet, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

Battleship, Vholtz, Rubber O Cement, Sixes at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 5 

CHILDREN 

Bonnie Lockhart & Fran Avni at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBTIONS 

“The Art of Metal” Jewelry, sculpture, and tableware by 73 California artists. Reception at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St.  

“Tinta Bella” color photographs by Jenna Zabin. Reception at 5 p.m. at Photolab Gallery, 2235 Fifth St. 644-1400. 

“Looking Glass” with works by Sydei SmithJordan, Zoe Martell, Susan Sarti and others. Reception at 6 p.m. at a Fusao Studios, 646 Kennedy St., Suite 108, Oakland.  

Mary Roehm, new work in wood fired porcelain. Reception at 5 p.m. at Trax Gallery, 1812 5th St. 540-8729.  

THEATER 

Beijing People’s Art Theater, “The Teahouse” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$68. 642-9988.  

Woman’s Will “Happy End” by Bertolt Brecht, Sat. at 7 p.m. and Sun. at 2 p.m. at Luka’s Lounge, 2221 Broadway at Grand Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12-$25. 420-0813.  

“The Arab-Israeli Cookbook” a play by Robin Soans at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $22. 848-0237.  

FILM 

Taisho Chic on Screen “Souls on the Road” at 6 p.m. and “The Golden Bullet” at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

“NBT Never Been Thawed” with co-writers Sean Anders and John Morris at Landmark’s Act 1&2, 2128 Center St. Tickets are $9.25. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bay Area Poets Coalition Annual Contest and Poetry Reading from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, dining hall, 1320 Addison St. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com  

Poetry Flash with Denise Duhamel and Virgil Suárez at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

Al Franken reads from his new book “Truth (with Jokes)” at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Community Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $5 with purchase of the book at Cody’s. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Harvest of Song with new works by Peter Josheff, Allen Shearer and Mark Secosh at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Pre-concert discussion at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $9-$10. 527-5059. 

Wildcat Viols performs England’s greatest masters of song at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. www.sfems.org 

Voices Lesbian Choral Ensemble at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15.  

The Meeting House Strings benefit concert for the Friends Committee on Legislation at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Friends Meeting House, corner of Walnut and Vine. Donation $5.  

Sorelle, women’s vocal ensemble, performs Handel’s “Dixit Dominus” with the Gentlemen of the Pacific Boychoir at 8 p.m. at Lake Park Methodist Church, 281 Santa Clara Ave., Oakland. Donation $10-$12. www.sorelle.org 

Marian Anderson String Quartet at 7:30 p.m. at Calvin Simmons Theater, 10 Tenth St. Tickets are $25-$40. 601-7919.  

Berkeley Saxaphone Quartet at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864.  

University Chorus and Chamber Chorus at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 642-9988.  

SambaDá Lecture and demonstration at 8 p.m., performance at 9:15 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Rhonda Benin and Soulful Strut at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Cas Lucas Acoustic Series at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts Center, 1923 Ashby Ave. www.epic 

arts.org 

Braziu at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10-$12. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Carolyn Chiung Jazz Trio at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Samantha Raven & Friends at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Reilly & Maloney at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Kasey Knudsen Sextet at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

Orishas, Cuban hip-hop, at 9 p.m. at Sweets Ballroom, 1933 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $23-$28. Sponsored by La Peña Cultural Center. 849-2568.  

Elijah Henry & Keren at 7 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Turn Me On Dead Man, The Radishes at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Arlington Houston Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Deadfall, Knife Fight, Career Suicide at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Justice Matters: Artists Consider Palestine” A exhibition of works by fourteen Palestinian and American artists. Reception at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco” guided tour at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. 

THEATER 

Beijing People’s Art Theater, “The Teahouse” at 3 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$68. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

Taisho Chic on Screen “Eternal Heart” at 3:30 p.m. and “Rebirth of the Capital” at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Senator Barbara Boxer introduces her debut novel, “A Time to Run” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Poetry Reading with Shanna Compton and Jennifer L. Knox at 8 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Harvest of Song with new works by Peter Josheff, Allen Shearer and Mark Secosh at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Pre-concert discussion at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $9-$10. 527-5059. 

Sorelle, women’s vocal ensemble, performs Handel’s “Dixit Dominus” with the Gentlemen of the Pacific Boychoir at 2 p.m. at Lake Park Methodist Church, 281 Santa Clara Ave., Oakland. Donation $10-$12. www.sorelle.org 

Carol Alban, flute, at 3:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Donation $10 and up. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to displaced hurricane Katrina victims now living in Oakland. 595-9009. 

Quartet San Francisco at 4 p.m. at Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. at Sacramento. Tickets are $12, free for chidren. 559-6910.  

Christopher Taylor performs Ligeti’s complete piano etudes at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32. 642-9988. 

Emeryville Taiko at 7:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $12, $10 for children. 925-798-1300. 

Twang Cafe, acoustic and Americana, at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Jesse Engel Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Alexa Weber Morales at 6:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $20. Benefit for Melrose Elementary School. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Mark Levine Trio at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12-$18. 845-5373.  

Lucy Kaplansky & Richard Shindell at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Cost is $24.50-$25.50. 548-1761.  

Jared Karol and Nate Cooper at 10 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. ?

The little Crataegus trees—hawthorns, thorntrees—in that grassy strip of Sacramento Street between Dwight Way and University Avenue bloom in the spring with pretty white flowers, but this is the season when they come into their own. They dress themselves in red berries while they still have leaves, then drop the leaves and keep the berries. On their slender horizontal branches, the berries hang gracefully and usefully all winter. 

They look seasonally jolly through Yule and feed our winter birds, too. I’ve seen flocks of cedar waxwings passing berries to one another, and robins in rowdy groups large enough to make the branches droop. The resident youth gangs of crows seem to spend a lot of time on the grass in those strips, and I suspect that fallen berr ies might be part of the attraction. (Crows and ravens typically spend a year or two after fledging in a roving group of their age-mates before claiming territories and pairing off to breed.) 

There are zillions, to use a technical term, of Crataegus spec ies and they hybridize madly. So I’m not going to venture a guess about whether these are European or North American thorns until I’ve talked to whoever procured them, and I’d be cautious then. 

They’re small trees or multi-stemmed shrubs, when left to th eir own devices; the shrubby kind is often pruned up into tree shape for gardens. They’re good for a small space, as they have small leaves, fruit, and flowers—all in scale—and their pale bark and interesting twig patterns reward a close look. The “haw” i n the often-used name “hawthorn” is an old words for “hedge,” and some species and individuals, though by no means all, do indeed have thorns. 

Bering members of the rose family, they’re subject to its troubles: fireblight, assorted fungi and diseases, th e usual bugs. But they’re not nearly so touchy as the average garden rose, and I haven’t seen a lot of sick hawthorns. (Knock wood.) 

One thing all the species have in common is that they’re good winter wildlife chow; another is that they’re also fodder f or myths and legends. Vance Randolph, the legendary Ozark folklore chronicler, wrote: 

Both redhaw [Crateagus] and blackhaw bushes are common in the Ozarks, and both are connected in the hillman’s mind with sexual misadventures-rapes and unfortunate pregn ancies and disastrous abortions and the like. 

This association probably traveled to our continent with the whole unruly bundle of European thorn tree legends. Consider the ballad “Down by the Greenwood Side:” “She leaned her back up against a thorn/… And there she had two little babes born.” The birth in question was not a welcome one, and the subject of the song ends up condemned to “seven years in the flames of Hell” for drowning them like kittens. 

Older European traditions about hawthorn include some contradictory stories; Greeks considered it the flower of married and general conjugal love, sacred to Hymenaeus, who among other activities played his lute for newlyweds. (In fact, if you read the various tales of Hymenaeus and his fellow Erotes, you’ll wonder where he found the time for musicianship. Not your average wedding singer, this guy.) 

Farther north, the Nordic folks regarded hawthorn as fit wood for a funeral pyre, as its smoke bore souls into the afterlife. I wonder if their habit of holding berries in winter qualified them for that. Today, on All Saints’ Day, one of the Dias de los Muertos, they’re doubly in season. 

As part of the Celtic sacred trio of Oak, Ask, and Thorn—which I notice some perhaps crypto-Pagan city garden planner has contrived to plant together along that stretch of Sacramento—hawthorns are variously the abode and disguise of witches, sacred to the Sidhe, a charm against evil spirits and fouling of meat or milk in storage and for better milk production in the dairy barn, and carried for good luck in fishing. 

Christians adapted all this luckiness by a declaring that Joseph of Arimathea carried a hawthorne staff and planted it in Britain, where it grew into a grand tree, the ancestor of all English thorns. Cromwell’s sold iers supposedly cut it down, but its seedlings have been passed from hand to hand and grown all over the island and beyond. 

Photograph by Ron Sullivan 

Crataegus trees—hawthorns, thorntrees—bloom with white flowers in the spring, but this is the season wh en they dress themselves in red berries.¥

TUESDAY, NOV. 1 

Birdwalk on the MLK Shoreline from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. to see the shorebirds here for the winter. Beginnners welcome, binoculars available for loan. 525-2233. 

Flu Shots for Berkeley Residents age 60 or over or “high-risk” from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Health Clinic, 830 University Ave. For information call 981-5300. 

WriterCoach Connection Training Sessions from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., also on Nov. 8. Help students improve their writing and critical thinking skills; become a mentor to students at Berkeley High, Willard, King or Longfellow Middle Schools. Commit to 1-2 hours per week during the school day. To register call 524-2319. www.writercoachconnection.org  

Discussion on Political Discourse with George Lakoff at 7:30 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Nonviolent Activists from Palestine/Israel Palestinian Ayed Morrar and Israeli Jonathan Pollak will speak on their work in nonviolent resistance to the occupation in Palestine at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 236-4250. www.norcalism.org  

“Ghostwriters in the Colonial Library: African Islam” with Prof. Sean Hanretta, Stanford Univ. at 4:30 p.m. at 652 Barrows Hall, UC Campus. 642-8338. 

Outdoor Digital Photography with Brandon Andre at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $20-$35. Registration required. 527-4140. 

Zonta Club of Berkeley meets at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. The speaker will be Rita Maran, President United Nations Association, East Bay. Dinner is $21. Reservations required. Please RSVP to 925-376-4370. www.zonta.org 

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss “Current Elections” from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Please bring snacks and soft drinks to share. No peanuts please. 601-6690. 

University Press Books Book Party celebrating new books by Charis Thompson and Trinh T. Minh-ha at 5:30 p.m. at 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

“Professionalizing Your Home-Based Business” with Leslie Philbrook, of Biesheuvel, Scarpa & Co. at 7 p.m. at the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Avenue, El Cerrito. 526-7512. 

Sing-A-Long from 1 to 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122. 

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043. 

“Daytime Care for Older Adults” with Maureen Dixon of Alameda County Services at 4 p.m. at Center for Older Adult Services, 828 San Pablo Ave., Albany. 558-7800. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 524-9992. 

Introduction to Buddhist Meditation at 7 p.m. at the Dzalandhara Buddhist Center in Berkeley. Cost is $7-$10. Call for directions. 559-8183. www.kadampas.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org  

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 2 

“The Dirty War in Argentina” with Patricia Isasa at 7:30 p.m. La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Venezuela Bolivariana: People and Struggle of the 4th World War” a documentary at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Free, donations of $5 accepted. 393-5685.  

Bookmark Reading Group meets to discuss Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” at 6:30 p.m. at 721 Washington St., Oakland. 336-0902. 

University Press Books Book Party celebrating a new book by Roger Hahn at 5:30 p.m. at 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

Community Dinner at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda at 6:15 pm. Cost is $8 for adults; $3.50 for children under 12. For reservations call 526-3805.  

“Comparative Religious Thought and Culture” with Dr. Felix Wilfred, Univ. of Madras, India at 7 p.m. at Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 649-2440. 

Aerial Classes for adults and children in spinning, climbing, sitting and dancing on trapeze begin at Studio 12, 2525 Eighth St. 587-0770. www.moving 

out.org  

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College Open House at 6 p.m. at 2550 Shattuck Ave. Tours of classrooms and clinics and information for prospective students. To RSVP call 666-8248, ext. 106.  

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters welcomes curious guests and new members at 7:15 a.m. at Au Coquelet Cafe, 2000 University Ave. at Milvia. 435-5863.  

Entrepreneurs Networking at 8 a.m. at A’Cuppa Tea, 3202 College Ave. at Alcatraz. Cost is $5. For more information contact JB, 562-9431.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Action St. 841-2174.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes. 548-9840. 

Prose Writer’s Workshop An ongoing group made up of friendly writers who are serious about our craft. All levels welcome. At 7 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

Salsa Dancing Lessons at 7 p.m. at the Lake Merritt Dance Center, 200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Cost is $15. 415-668-9936. 

Sing your Way Home A free sing-a-long at 4:30 p.m. every Wed. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch Bring your knitting, crocheting and other handcrafts from 6 to 9 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, NOV. 3 

Flu Shots for Berkeley Residents age 60 or over or “high-risk” from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Health Clinic, 830 University Ave. For information call 981-5300. 

“The American Self in Film” with David Thomson and Mike Katovich at 7:30 p.m. at College Prep School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 339-7726. www.collegeprep.org/livetalk 

Embracing Diversity Films “The Mexican Laborer” at 7 p.m. in the Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. 527-1328. 

Wardrobe for Opportunity Fall Fashion Show at 5 p.m. in the Rounda Building, 300 Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakland. Wardrobe for Opportunity is a nonprofit providing professional clothing and career support to disadvantaged jobseekers. Cost is $40 in advance, $50 at the door. www.wardrobe.org 

Consumer Protections for Seniors: How to Avoid Scams and Frauds at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Internet Resources on Aging at 4 p.m. at Center for Older Adult Services, 828 San Pablo Ave., Albany. 558-7800. 

Prostate Cancer Screening for uninsured or low-income men from 4:30 to 7 p.m. at Alta Bates Markstein Center. Free, but appointments required. 869-8833. 

“Harvesting the New American Dream” AnewAmerica’s 6th Annual Gala, celebrating immigrants, refugees, and new citizens, as successful micro entrepreneurs, at 6 p.m. at the Holy Redeemer Conference Center, 8945 Golf Links Rd. Oakland. Tickets are $75. 540-7785. www.anewamerica.org 

Better Referral Network Visitors Day at 7 a.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck at Cedar. 527-5267. www.bni.com  

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

FRIDAY, NOV. 4 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Al Young, the California Poet Laureate on “Creativity is Human Survival: A Poet’s View” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020. 

Benefit with Dolores Huerta, United Farmworkers at 7:30 p.m., at St Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison. Donation $10. To benefit School of the Americas Watch. 597-0171. 

Latinos in Baseball with Tito Fuentes and Diego Segui at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Tenth and Oak Sts. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage” with author Heather Rogers at AK Press, 674A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Asian Business Association Benefit Fashion/Variety Show at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$12.  

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, NOV. 5 

Morning Chores at the Little Farm Feed the animals, collect the eggs, and do other chores at 9 a.m. at Tilden Little Farm, Tilden Park. Dress to get dirty. 525-2233. 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

Sick Plant Clinic UC plant pathologist Dr. Robert Raabe, UC entomologist Dr. Nick Mills, and their team of experts will diagnose what ails your plants from 9 a.m. to noon at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755.  

“Preparing Your Garden for Winter” at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Al Franken “The Truth (with Jokes)” at 7:30 p.m.. at Berkeley Community Theater, 1930 Allston Way on the Berkeley High Campus. Cost is $12, or $5 with pre-purchase of the book from Cody’s. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

“Build Cross-Class Alliances” with Betsy Leondar-Wright on how to build stronger movements for social change, at 2 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland. Cost is $5-$25. To register email simcha3@msn.com, www.classmatters.org 

Berkeley Digital Media Conference on the emergence and implications of the digital lifestyle at the Haas School of Business, UC Campus. Cost is $60 for students, $125 for general admission. 642-0342. 

Free Emergency Preparedness Class on Basic Personal Preparedness from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at West Berkeley Senior Center. To sign up call 981-5506. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ 

fire/oes.html 

Global Warming Summit with workshops and panel discussions for high school and college students on the UC Campus. For information see www.energyaction.net/casummit 

“The Big Bang” with author Simon Singh at 7 p.m. at Chabot Space & Science Center. Tickets are $7. 336-7373. www.chabotspace.org 

“Latest Theories About the Universe” Theoretical Physics Made Easy from 1 to 5 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science. Tickets are $80 available from www.ticketweb.com 

Anahat Second Annual South Asian Acappella Competition at 6:30 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., Tickets are $15-$20.  

East Bay Atheists Berkeley Meeting with Dr. Anthony Somkin on the nature of death at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., 3rd floor Meeting Room. 222-7580. 

Travel Tips for Alaska A day-long workshop beginnning at 8:30 a.m. at Vista Community College, 2020 Milvia St. 981-2931. www.peralta.cc.ca.us 

Healthy Oakland Health Fair with food, music, children’s activities, social services booths, and health screenings from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the East Oakland Deliverance Center, 7425 International Blvd. www.blackwallstreet.org 

Karamu: A Pan-African Celebration with food, music and artisans, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 338 Ninth St., Oakland. Tickets are $40. 435-5074. 

Anime Convention with vendors, contests and original artwork from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. Cost is $15, children 8 and under $8. amimage.berkeley.edu 

Sample Dance Classes at The Beat including include tap, tango, jazz, salsa, samba, zydeco, belly dance, ballet, from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 2560 9th St. 548-5348. www.the-beat.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Flower Essence Therapy for Animals at 3 p.m. at Rabbitears, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Donation $20. 525-6155. www.rabbitears.org 

Heal Your Back and Straighten Your Spine at 10 a.m. at Phamaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 6 

Watershed Hike to explore Wildcat Creek. Meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Nature Center, Tilden Park. Bring lunch and drink. Dress for rain and mud. Hike is about 3 miles. 525-2233. 

Conversations with Nature A journal and art workshop at 2 p.m. at Change Makers, 6536 Telegraph Ave. RSVP to wolfbird7@sbcglobal.net 

Daniel Ellsberg on “National Security Whistle-Blowing: Ethics and Law” at noon at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Sponsored by the ACLU. 

Native Plants and Peoples Tour with demonstrations and hands-on experiences from noon to 3 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Dr. 643-2755.  

Haiku and You Make a recycled journal and be inspired to write some haiku poetry from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. For ages 10 and up. 525-2233. 

Free Entree for Veterans, in appreciation for their service to our country, at Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto, 1919 Fourth St. 845-7771. 

Gumbo by the Bay at Sunset An afternoon of food, art and music from 3 to 6 p.m. at Western Drive, Pt. Richmond. Cost is $50-$75. Benefits ArtsChange. 231-1348. www.artschange.org 

Flu and Pneumonia Shots from 1 to 5 p.m. at Phamaca Integrative Pharmacy, 1744 Solano Ave. Cost is $25 and $35. 527-8929. 

Integrative Medicine and Alternative Health Conference with speakers and workshops from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Dwinelle Hall, UC Campus. Free. www.studentsforintegrativemedicine.info 

UC Berkeley Folkdancers Reunion at 1:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

“Ancient Malta: Crossroads of Mediterranean Cultures” at 1 p.m. in Room 101, Archeological Research Facility, UC Campus. 415-338-1537. 

Circus Arts in the Schools with acrobats, clowns, jugglers and musicians at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. at Kofman Auditorium, 2200 Central Ave., Alameda. 510-4636. 

Meet Rescued Rats available for adoption and learn about their care and feeding at 2:30 p.m. at Rabbitears, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 525-6155. www.rabbitears.org 

Free Sailboat Rides between 1 and 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club in the Berkeley Marina. Bring warm waterproof clothes. www.cal-sailing.org 

“Esoteric Energy Work from Around the World” with Irving Feurst, at 10 a.m. at International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Breath workshop follows. 245-3737, ext. 7. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, NOV. 7 

Sacred Site Shellmound Peace Walk beginning in Vallejo and ending at the Emeryville Huchiun Shellmound on Nov. 25. For information call 453-9002. shellmoundwalk@yahoo.com 

“About GMOs” Prof. Ignacio Chapela will speak on the introduction of genetically-modified organisms into our food supply at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. at Arch. Free. Wheelchair accessible. 843-8724. 

Positive Parenting A six-week series of classes on raising healthy, competent children, at 7 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. 658-7353. www.bananas.org 

“Greek Hate: Athenian War Propaganda and the Persians” The W. Kendrick Pritchett Lecture with Maureen Miller, Univ. of Sydney at 8 p.m. in the Alumni House, UC Campus. 415-338-1537. 

Tour of the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, including access to selections from the GTU’s collection of rare books, at 5 p.m. at 2400 Ridge Rd. Reservations required. 649-2420. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Nov. 2, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Tasha Tervelon, 981-5190. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/women 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs. Nov. 3, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 3, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

3

For the first eight months of the year, Berkeley proved the East Bay’s hot spot for thefts, burglaries and other forms of property crime—topping the rates for Richmond and Oakland—while the city’s crimes of violence ranked in the mid-range. 

That’s the word from Police Chief Douglas N. Hambleton, who gave the City Council a detailed crime briefing Tuesday. He said his department would begin presenting the council with quarterly updates. 

Tuesday’s presentation, prepared with the help of city Information Technology mapping specialist Patrick DeTemple and Sgt. Steve Odom of BPD’s Community Services Bureau, also included the unveiling of a new Internet tool for the public. 

Incorporating many of the features currently used in a similar site operated by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the webpage will allow the public to see crime maps created by selecting an area and one or more types of crime. 

Among the crime statisics reported by Hambleton: 

• Violent crimes in the first eight months of 2005 dropped by 2.8 percent from the same period last year. 

• Robberies, of which there were 223, accounted for 63 percent of all violent crimes, a decrease of 9 percent from last year, while aggravated assaults (116) increased by 6 percent from 109 in 2004; homicides dropped from 3 to 2.  

• Thefts accounted for the lion’s share of property crimes (3,650 of 5,390), followed by car thefts (892), burglaries (829) and arsons (19). 

• Berkeley’s homicide rate was 3.6 homicides per 100,000 residents, compared with 36.4 in Richmond and 22.5 in Oakland. 

• The rate of rapes in Berkeley was 14.5 per 100,000, compared to 37.4 in Richmond and 70.2 in Oakland. 

• The robbery rate was 318 per 100,000, compared to 520 in Richmond and 586.8 in Oakland. 

• Berkeley’s property crime rate was 8,007.7 per 100,000, compared to 6,476.5 in Richmond and 6,015.8 in Oakland. 

Councilmembers praised the mapping project. 

“I’m very grateful to see objective information” made available, said Max Anderson. “It will be very helpful not only for us as policy-makers and for you, but for the community.” 

Kriss Worthington, whose Southside district includes the highest concentrations of both property crimes and violent crimes, said he liked the idea, but added that he would like to see an additional factor included in the data—population density. 

Noting that a two-block area of his district houses about 2,000 students, he said it’s no wonder there is a concentration of crime. Perhaps, he suggested, another tool that could be added to the mapping program would display information in a way that reflected density as well as geographic areas. 

“The caveats you’re raising should be addressed,” DeTemple said.  

“Density maps are very interesting,” Councilmember Gordon Wozniak said. “We need a description of a general policy where the goal is that the rates should be the same for all parts of the city. I would like to see options for what can be done within the department and other city departments to lower (the rates) within the hotspots.” 

De Temple said Berkeley’s crime mapping site will include design features suggested in meetings between Odom’s bureau and members of neighborhood watch and other community groups. 

“The big point to me is that for crime prevention, the better picture we have, the better outreach we can do,” Chief Hambleton said. 

Included in the presentation to the council were detailed color maps pinpointing the distribution of different kinds of crimes in the city. But the bulk of the discussion focused on the current crime data in the chief’s report. 

Hambleton said violent crime has been dropping throughout the country. “Now, in Berkeley, it’s lower than during the 1970s,” he said. 

Violent crime figures listed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national crime report showed a larger-than-usual drop for Berkeley because of change in the city’s own reporting methods for aggravated assault, said the chief. 

In previous years the city had been including crimes not reported by other cities, including robberies, assaults, kidnaps and other crimes that could have resulted in great bodily injuries but didn’t. The FBI figures specify that only those crimes that result in such injuries be included in the category. 

“We corrected the figures internally in 2003, but now in time for the report to the Department of Justice,” said Hambleton, “the 2004 figures are correct.” 

Worthington asked if open doors and windows accounted for part of the city’s high property crime rate, noting that college students often left dorm rooms unlocked. He also wondered if the same thing was true with auto burglaries. 

“Sometimes,” said the chief, adding that “30 to 40 percent of residential burglaries are via unlocked doors and windows.” 

The high rate of auto burglaries may stem in part from the large numbers of out-of-city residents who commute to Berkeley for their jobs and studies at the university. Another factor, he said, was the relatively high percentage of cars which are parked on streets overnight. 

Car burglars won’t hesitate to smash windows when something of value is left in a locked car, he said. “They will break the windows if they see a handful of change, and that drives a lot of this,” he said. 

In addition, most of the car thefts in Berkeley are simply the result of someone wanting wheels to drive to home to places like Oakland and Richmond, which accounts for the 88 percent recovery rate of cars stolen in the city,” Hambleton said. 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli asked the chief what percent of Berkeley crimes were committed by people who live outside the city, adding, “Where could you find more laptop computers than in the South Campus area?” 

Hambleton said that the department’s last look at the issue was done a few years ago, and revealed that more than half of Berkeley’s robbery suspects came from outside city limits.  

Hambleton said that the new crime displays provide a way for his department to offer better outreach to the community. 

“We have concentrated a great deal of our efforts on violent crimes, and we haven’t spent as much on property crimes,” he said. With the new system, “there are opportunities for us with better analysis and coordination within the department, to do that.” 

And to do that best, Hambleton said, the department needs a full-time crime analyst, a point he raised several times during Tuesday’s session.  

Capitelli, who heads a real estate firm, said he was concerned that the maps might discourage people looking into renting an apartment or buying a residence in Berkeley. Similarly, he said, current residents might be discouraged by discovering they live in high crime areas. 

“Rather than seeing them vote with their feet, we’d like to see them vote with their locks,” said the chief, “because a lot of the crimes are easily avoided.” 

Staring in the face of a potential $1.4 million loss in annual sales tax revenue, Berkeley Planning Commissioners decided to look further into a plan to set up portions of West Berkeley as auto sales zones after hearing a bleak preliminary report from city staff at the commission’s regular meeting Wednesday night. 

The changes are being urged by Mayor Tom Bates. 

On a motion from commission member Susan Wengraf, commissioners authorized a workshop in which city staff, residents, auto dealer representatives, and other interested parties would be able to share information and give their views on the subject. No date was set for the workshop. 

“While I’m very supportive of the West Berkeley Plan, for $1.5 million I might just cave in,” Commissioner Gene Poschman said in supporting moving forward with a study of the proposal. 

But at least preliminarily, neither staff nor commissioners appeared in favor of a large concentration of dealers in one auto mall-type location or large tracts of land for individual dealerships, either. 

“We won’t be necessarily looking at four acre sites,” said Land Use Planning Manager Mark Rhoades. “We’d try to get the sizes down considerably.” 

Planning Commission Chairperson Harry Pollack said, “None of us have a vision of big, sprawling lots. We’d like this to be as unsprawled as possible.” 

No auto dealer appeared at Wednesday’s commission meeting to make their case, and no resident spoke specifically against the proposed study. Both of those situations are expected to change as the proposal moves forward. 

Berkeley has five new-vehicle dealerships accounting for 11 percent of the city’s sales tax revenue. The largest, Weatherford BMW, is located at the foot of Ashby Avenue. Three others—McKevitt Volvo Nissan, Berkeley Honda, and Toyota of Berkeley—are located along a small stretch of Shattuck Avenue between Channing Way and Derby Street, and the fifth, McNevin Cadillac & Volkswagen, is on San Pablo Avenue north of University Avenue. 

Berkeley Community Development Project Coordinator Dave Fogarty told commissioners that because of economic pressures coming principally from the dealership’s national offices, the city is at significant risk of losing four of the five. 

Fogarty said that Weatherford BMW is on property owned by Berkeley Toyota, with a lease set to expire in four years. He said that Weatherford is “definitely pursuing an alternative site in Berkeley” and already has a potential property in mind. 

He noted that the dealership is being wooed by Oakland, which is looking towards a possible relocation of its Broadway Auto Row to property that formerly formed part of the Oakland Army Base. 

According to Fogarty, two of the remaining dealerships are in short-term leased space. 

“They’re reluctant to invest in property that they don’t own or they can’t get a long-term lease on,” he said, and reported that the dealerships are under pressure to relocate to “more competitive locations” either inside or outside Berkeley, with the Volvo portion of the McKevitt dealership looking at moving to Emeryville. 

One of those other auto dealers “is also pursuing property in West Berkeley, but it would be a leap of faith for them to do so without a change in zoning,” Fogarty said. 

Only Toyota is likely to remain in Berkeley if the circumstances do not change, Fogarty said, with a probable move to its Ashby property once Weatherford BMW’s lease ends. 

New auto sales are limited to restricted areas of Berkeley, with a staff reporter from Assistant City Planner Jordan Harrison noting that “few sites available in these areas suit the needs of dealerships.” 

In addition, Harrison wrote that several of the available locations that were originally zoned for new auto sales “do not seem appropriate for auto uses today, as this large land use does not fit in well with the urban design or neighborhood context of these areas, particularly along Shattuck, Telegraph and University avenues.” 

Planning staff suggested several possible zoning changes, but said it was too early in the process to make recommendations. Among the suggested possible zoning changes to entice auto dealerships to stay in Berkeley were: 

• Allowing large auto dealerships in West Berkeley around each of the I-80 exits and as far east as 10th Street. 

• Focusing the dealerships north of Virginia Street and mainly west of Third Street. 

• Allowing dealerships in specific “overlay” districts along Frontage Road and Second Street and within close proximity to the Gilman and Ashby Avenue interchanges with I-80. 

• Allowing dealerships within 2,000 feet of the Gilman and Ashby I-80 interchanges, but not near University Avenue or along Frontage Road or Second Street.›

Suppose they held an election in Berkeley, but no one showed up to open the polls? 

That’s the situation the city was facing ten days ago, when Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi informed Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz that Berkeley was short 90 poll workers, and did not have enough staff to open three separate polling places. Muranishi listed the Westminster House, the YWCA Main Lounge, and the 515 Arlington Ave. polling places as the three in jeopardy. 

Since that time, enough new workers have signed up that city precincts are now only about 10 short, and the three problem polling places are close to full staffs. 

According to acting Alameda County Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold, “whatever people have been doing out there to get the word out about the staffing problems, it’s working.” She said that county employees were recruited, and Berkeley High School students, especially, were helpful in filling the unmet polling place needs. 

Election workers are coordinated through the office of the county Registrar of Voters. 

A spokesperson in the California Secretary of State’s office, Nghia Nguyen, said that their office had been requested to help recruit poll workers for three other counties in addition to Alameda: Santa Clara, San Diego, and Butte. Nguyen said that such requests for assistance are “normal” and are made by different counties throughout the state during every election, and she did not believe that the staffing problems were especially related to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special election. 

The problem in getting poll workers, Alameda County’s Ginnold said, is “an extremely long day, a lot of responsibility, particularly for inspectors, and the pay is low.” 

Polling clerks and judges are expected to work from 6 a.m. until the votes are secured. Inspectors have the additional responsibility of running the polling place, including setting up the machines and opening them up, supervising the other workers, and making sure the votes are transmitted to the central counting station and the voting machines secured. 

Inspectors are paid $122.50 per election, while judges and clerks are paid $92.50. 

Ginnold said that the county is looking into increasing the pay rate for the primary election scheduled for next June. 

Next month’s election may—or may not—be the last in Alameda County using Diebold touchscreen machines. Those machines are operating under a state certification that expires at the end of the year. Voting machines used in any subsequent elections in California must operate with a verifiable paper trail, which the Alameda County Diebold machines do not possess. Ginnold said that Alameda County has already put out a Request For Proposal to election machine companies—including Diebold—for the new systems, with bids due in by Nov. 9. 

Concerns over the Diebold touchscreens has already had an effect, in part, on the November special election in Berkeley. 

Berkeley City Clerk Sara Cox said that because the county did not make paper ballots available for pre-election day voting at local precinct stations, the city would not exercise its option to conduct early voting at Berkeley City Hall as it has in previous years. 

“There is concern within the city about the Diebold touch screen machines, which would have been the only early voting procedure available to us,” Cox said. “We’re encouraging people to vote by absentee ballot if they want to vote before election day.” 

Cox said that in addition to the Diebold concerns, the city simply did not have the available staff to operate a pre-election polling place at City Hall. “We’d be pushed over the edge if we tried to do it,” she said. 

Cox said that as in the past, Berkeley voters during the special election will have the option of using a paper ballot in lieu of the Diebold machines at Berkeley precincts on election day. In addition, she said that voters wishing to cast pre-election votes on paper ballots on-site are able to do so at the registrar’s office at the county courthouse in Oakland.?

Plans for a new transit station in Richmond took a big step forward this week. 

Construction is scheduled to begin today (Friday) for the $6.4 million station building, which planners are promising will improve conditions for commuters while breathing new life into Richmond’s troubled ‘traditional’ downtown area. 

The station will service riders of BART, Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor and AC Transit, and will serve as the linchpin of the city’s decade-long plan to spark economic growth downtown by transforming the area into a transit village. 

Richmond city leaders, including Mayor Irma Anderson, said they were happy to see the plan progressing and were quick to point out the station’s importance to both the community and the region. Richmond station is the only Bay Area station linking all three of the region’s major transit services. 

“I am so pleased to see the three major modes of mass transit that serve our community coming together as a regional transit hub,” said Anderson. “It brings these services together into one new, architecturally significant, station building.” 

Ten years in the making, plans call for construction of the new station to last until November 2006, though project managers say the ongoing work won’t disrupt service for commuters.  

When it’s complete, planners say the station will offer greatly improved pedestrian and handicapped access by adding a new elevator and reconfigured stairway. The station will also have plenty of natural lighting from its planned canopy roof, as well as enhanced waiting areas, an outdoor plaza and public art—including a large triptych mural by artists Daniel Galvez and Jos Sances.  

The new, above-ground station will compliment two residential components of the transit village, and will expand the city’s Nevin pedestrian corridor along MacDonald Avenue to connect to Richmond’s Social Security office and Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, two frequent destinations for commuters. 

The walkway will be elevated and enhanced with new lighting and greenery. Later phases of the project will bring commuter-friendly retail shops to the area, as well as a realtime message board inside the station’s waiting room. A pedestrian link to Richmond’s civic center is also in the works. 

“We’re making enhancements to make it a focal point for pedestrian circulation, and a friendlier, more welcome place to be,” said Gary Hembree, chief of projects for the Richmond Community Redevelopment Agency, which has been overseeing development of the station. 

Funding for the $110 million transit village project comes from a public-private partnership between a host of state and local agencies and the Olson company, which is developing much of the transit village’s residential component. Olson has already built Metro Walk, a 231-unit development to the west of the station, and will also construct an 800-space parking garage that will replace surface parking for commuters. An additional 300-plus residential units will be built to the east of the station as part of the project’s next phase.  

The sum of Richmond’s current plans adds up to create one of the largest economic development projects there since World War II, when the city enjoyed growth and prosperity from its shipbuilding industry. The years since have been marked by decline, particularly noticeable in the city’s old downtown area where high unemployment and crime plague the neighborhood. 

“The area is in desperate need of revitalization,” said Tom Butt, a Richmond city councilmember. “Having a multi-modal transit center right in the middle of downtown is the most important piece of putting this area back together.” 



A 20-year-old Richmond resident died in a fatal traffic accident at the intersection of University and San Pablo avenues at 2:30 a.m. Thursday. 

Dan Apperson, supervisor for the Alameda County Coroner’s Office, identified the woman as Christine Phan Dao, who worked as a clerk at Costco’s south Richmond warehouse store. 

She is survived by her father, Tony Dao, also of Richmond, Apperson said. 

Berkeley Police spokesperson Officer Shira Warren said Dao was headed northbound on University Avenue at the time of the accident, and that the other driver was headed north on San Pablo Avenue when he struck Dao’s motorcycle. 

Warren said the northbound motorist, whom she declined to identify, is in police custody at Highland Hospital, where he is being treated for injuries sustained in the crash. 

He is suspected of being intoxicated at the time of the collision, she said. 

—

Berkeley city councilmembers passed the second and final readings of the soft story and condominium ordinances Tuesday, as well as the city plan and zoning changes needed to construct the Gilman Street Playing Fields complex. 

The condo and ballfields measures were adopted without discussion along with other items on the consent calendar, while the soft story measure generated considerable discussion.  

The ordinance requires owners of buildings placed on a city register of structures with earthquake-vulnerable ground floors to submit engineering reports on their buildings and notify tenants and the public of their dangers. 

As adopted, the measure doesn’t mandate seismic upgrades, something that may be added later after city officials and councilmembers have more time to ponder the issue. 

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, the manager of a real estate firm, objected to a provision of the soft story ordinance that calls for recording notices of the structural vulnerabilities with the Alameda County Recorder’s Office, because the recording could lead insurers to cancel policies and lenders to call in loans. 

Dan Lambert, senior management analyst for the Building and Safety Department, told Capitelli the recordings were included “to notify potential buyers that engineering work needs to be done on the buildings.” 

“We looked at insurance companies and banks and they said they already look at these types of buildings already,” added Lambert, “and, is it a good thing or a bad thing if the price reflects seismic safety in this type of market?” 

When it came time for the final vote, Capitelli abstained and the rest of the council voted their approval. 

By-right housing additions 

Proposed amendments to the city’s by-right housing addition law met a rockier course. 

The original proposal by Councilmembers Wozniak and Betty Olds called for changes that would have allowed by-right additions by zoning certificates of up to 700 square feet for ground floor expansions, and required administrative use permits for all second-story additions, rather than allowing them by zoning certificates, as is currently the practice. 

With Wozniak’s concurrence, Olds reduced the ground floor by-right addition to the current 500-square-feet limit. 

But implementation proved far more complex, both because the changes would require amendments to all of the city’s current zoning districts and because the imposition of the use permit process would requirement an additional half- to three-quarters of a planning staffer’s daily time. 

As a result, the proposal was remanded to staff for further study.  

The council also: 

• Authorized the addition of six Toyota Prius hybrid cars to the city’s vehicle fleet. 

• Delayed acting on two opposing resolutions urging either the demolition or preservation of the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a decision that is in the hands of the U.S. Department of Energy. 

• Approved the addition of a 977-square-foot three-car garage to a home at 1732-34 La Vereda Road, rejecting an appeal by neighbors of an earlier vote by the Zoning Adjustments Board. 

• Approved expansion of the new credit card payable parking stations to the North Shattuck and Southside areas, and 

• Granted a six-month lease on a building at Aquatic Park to Fix Our Ferals, which will use the structure for a sterilization program for free range wild cats to head off a sudden explosion of unwanted kittens in the springtime.  

Fire Department savings 

During the workshop session before the meeting, Fire Chief Debra Pryor informed councilmembers that her department’s flexible deployment plan, introduced as a cost savings measure in July, has saved the city about $200,000 while not causing any loss in response time for emergency calls. 

The increases in overtime during the period were attributable to the firefighters who were called up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to participate in rescue and body search efforts in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita—$71,758 in overtime that Pryor said is slated for reimbursement by the feds. 

“Do you think you can count on that, considering what’s happened with FEMA?” quipped Councilmember Betty Olds, drawing laughter from her colleagues. 

The flexible deployment plan reduces staffing levels by one engine company per shift, temporarily reducing up to three positions per shift which would otherwise have to be filled by employees on overtime because of the current 10 vacancies in qualified firefighter positions. 

Pryor said replacements have been hired for all the vacancies, but that they can’t go on active duty until they have completed all aspects of their training. 

The plan was also helped by this season’s virtual lack of critical fire days. During the current fire season, which will end sometime next week, only one critical fire danger day was declared. 

During a more general discussion on response times to fire calls, Councilmember Max Anderson asked what impact speed humps, traffic circles and other so-called calming devices have on response times. 

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said each such device adds about 10 seconds to a call, so that a block with three speed humps might add a half-minute to response times needed to reach a property at the far end of a block. 

“That could be important in some cases,” Orth said.

Photograph by Jakob Schiller: Kelly English, 35, rests under a makeshift rain shelter he made in People’s Park during the rain showers on Tuesday. A graduate of Kennedy High in Richmond and of Diablo Valley College, he handed out his resume, which said, “I bring work and personal attributes that foster positive, respectful and peaceful relationships with my co-workers and customers. I want responsible employment with a team that also values these attributes.”

iJacked 

A pair of strong-arm bandits accosted an 18-year-old man was walking along the 2000 block of Shattuck Avenue at 1:25 a.m. Monday and robbed him of his iPod MP3 player. 

Thorny theft 

Person or persons unknown at a time unknown swiped a Thanksgiving cactus off the porch of a home in the 2000 block of Parker Street, according to the resident who discovered the goniff’s work Monday morning. 

iJack 2.0 

Another fellow discovered that someone had smashed a window of his car in the 2200 block of Dwight Way sometime before 9 a.m. Monday and absconded with his iPod and PDA, aka, personal data assistant. 

Family fight 

When police responded to a 911 call at 2:15 p.m. Monday, they arrived at a home in the 1200 block of 67th Street to find a mother and daughter both in need of medical attention. 

While the details are unclear, it appears that pepper spray and an unknown hard object were involved after a mother/daughter spat escalated. 

When the dust settled, it was the 17-year-old daughter who wound up being arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, brandishing a deadly weapon and battery, said Officer Warren. 

Both parties received emergency room treatment. 

Burglary tools 

After officers stopped a 21-year-old Oakland man as he was walking in the 2500 block of Benvenue Avenue at 10:30 p.m. Monday, they discovered he was in possession of burglary tools and booked him accordingly. 

Jewelry store smasher 

Police arrested a 53-year-old fellow on suspicion of burglary after an alarm summoned them to Greer Jewelers at 2983 Sacramento St., where the fellow had smashed in a window and was scooping up jewelry on display. 

As is the case with most jewelry merchants, the good stuff had already been locked away in a safe for the evening.¸

Mary Otani was born in Berkeley to hardworking immigrant parents from Okinawa. One of six children, she was a good student, and loved to play basketball. As a student at UC Berkeley, Mary was already interested in social justice, and worked with other YWCA students to support fair housing legislation. 

When World War II broke out and Japanese Americans were expelled from their homes and sent to camps, Mary’s family stayed in a horse stall at Tanforan race track, then were sent to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. At camp there were no educational facilities for college students. A Quaker group, the Forum on Reconciliation, arranged for students to be placed in colleges away from the West Coast. Mary went to Boston University. There she met Bill, who was in the U.S. Army studying Japanese language at Harvard. They married before Bill went off to serve as a medic in Europe. In August, they celebrated their 61st anniversary. 

Mary’s early interest in fair housing has been a lifelong concern. She worked in the office of the housing project where they lived to make sure the housing was racially integrated. She followed housing issues for years, most recently working on land trusts and renter’s rights. 

Mary always put her family first. When her three children were young, she kept to their schedule by being the secretary to the elementary school principal. She organized volunteers in the school library, helped with PTA, Cub Scouts and Brownies. She worked for many years at the Consumer’s Cooperative grocery store’s Kiddie Corral, a unique service of quality child care while parents shopped. For years she arranged her schedule around fixing lunch every day for her elderly father. 

Mary’s interest in the community extended to many areas. Whenever she saw a need, she found others who wanted to work on it and helped coordinate the effort to accomplish innovative solutions. At a time when the public schools did little to prepare students for world citizenship, Mary and others at the Unitarian Church organized a summer program that introduced children to the cultures of the world through positive experiences with language, food and customs. 

Her involvement in the community touched many areas. She helped establish a senior center in Richmond Annex and supported saving land for parks in Richmond. For the League of Women Voters, she worked on many issues, monitoring the City Council and Port Commission. Each election, she worked on preparing the pros and cons stating the candidates’ positions on the issues. 

Mary had a dedication to looking out for the well being of everyone, especially the less represented. When the U.S. government apologized to Japanese Americans who were interned and paid reparations, Mary and friends organized a scholarship fund with their money to provide scholarships to Southeast Asian immigrant students to help those who are the first in their families to go to college. 

Cooperatives were another theme in Mary’s life that shows her belief in the power of people working together. She and Bill were early members of the Berkeley Coop grocery stores. (Bill even worked in the produce department for a short time.) Their children went to co-op pre-school and she organized a family cooperative swim group that rented the Albany pool and swam there for years. She worked on a co-op approach again with organizing a buying club for groceries, an effort to provide reasonably priced food to Richmond families that ultimately developed into the Richmond Farmer’s Market. Mary also served on a number of Richmond commissions and committees. 

The Farmer’s Market represented Mary’s down to earth values. She believed in the power of people coming together to work for the common good. She was committed to improving everyone’s access to basic needs like food, shelter, education and health care. Lani Herrmann, a friend from the Farmer’s Market, has said that Mary was a kind of “glue” that quietly brought people together. Throughout her life she worked to build a community that was a better place for everyone. 

Mary’s life will be celebrated Nov. 25 at 3 p.m. at Cragmont School Multipurpose Room, 830 Regal Road, Berkeley. 

Tom Butt is a member of the Richmond City Council.

Do you ever not know what to do on a Friday or Saturday night? Do you feel like there is something going on you’re missing out on? 

On Friday night and Saturday night, Berkeley High School’s (BHS) Drama Department will be presenting The Laramie Project. Under the direction of BHS Drama Teacher Jordan Winer, a group of Berkeley High students has produced a spectacular play originally created by the Tectonic Theater Project, Inc. from New York City. 

Auditions for the cast began in May. 

“To put it simply, I was looking for people who could quickly change characters,” said Winer, in his eighth year at BHS, the past five in the drama department. Around 50 kids showed enough interest in the play to try out, but not all made it. Many were scared at first to try out. 

“Well, at first I didn’t really want to audition, because I was insecure about my acting abilities,” said sophomore Emily Fong, who made the cast. “But then I was like, ‘this is The Laramie Project. I have to be a part of it.’ It has so much potential to raise awareness of homophobia.” 

Only 19 students were selected to be in the cast, while more than 30 were cut. 

Winer told the cast that they needed to memorize most of their lines over the summer. When the kids came back in September, they were ready and they were pumped. Nearly all of the people who were in the play had been in a drama class before or had previous acting experience 

For the first month, they practiced in small groups a few times during the week. At these times, they would talk about how to get into the mind of the character. For example, they would discuss how a gay person would act, or how a homophobic person would act. All these things were important for the person playing the character to get in the mindset of their character. During the second month, they started practicing as a whole group. 

“It was pretty tricky [to practice as a larger group],” Winer said. “I thought that it was going to be just a bunch of monologues. But to make it dramatic, we had to be creative. It was harder than I had thought.” 

This drama enfolds on the night of Oct. 6, 1998 in the rural town of Laramie, Wyo. Matthew Shepherd, a 21-year old gay college student, meets two men at the Fireside Bar. Later he is found by a bicyclist to have been severely beaten and abused, tied up, and left dead off a fence near a road. 

This production focuses on the effects that the death of Shepherd had on the people of Laramie. The actors take on the persona of the people in the town of Laramie and it provides quite an insight into how life has changed. 

When asked why an average Berkeley resident would want to see The Laramie Project, Winer responded, “Because it’s put on by high school kids who are really at a professional level of acting.” 

“And it doesn’t just show one side of the story,” exclaimed Fong. “Someone had sent a letter to the superintendent saying that they had heard about The Laramie Project and thought that it was ‘anti-homophobic’ and ‘pro-gay’. But it shows so many different opinions of so many people, just like people in Berkeley. Anyone who comes to see this play can connect with someone.” 

Cast members got a shock during preview week prior to the first performance. Between second and third period, someone had written “I Hate Fags” in the girls’ bathroom in big letters. The incident left many cast members in tears. However, they said the episode made them stronger. 

“It just reminded me so much of why I am doing this play,” Fong said. “People can convince themselves that Berkeley is not homophobic and not sexist, but when you walk into the girls’ bathroom at Berkeley High School and see this, something is wrong, Despite all of that, it gave us so much more passion to do this play.” 

The production débuted last Friday. It continues tonight (Friday) and tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Florence Schwimely Little Theater on Allston Way between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Milvia. Ticket are $6 for students and seniors and $12 for adults. 

Rio Bauce is a student at Berkeley High School. 

›

Latino journalists are disturbed by what they fear could be a new trend in the Hispanic media market: the outsourcing of ethnic media.  

In California’s Silicon Valley, where high-tech industries have found they can produce the same product overseas for a fraction of the cost, one media company is following suit, shutting down its local Spanish-language paper and replacing it with a tabloid produced in Mexico.  

The San Jose Mercury News announced Oct. 21 that it is closing its nine-year-old Spanish-language weekly Nuevo Mundo in order to cut costs. It is also selling its Vietnamese-language weekly Viet Mercury.  

Knight Ridder, owner of the Mercury News, is replacing Nuevo Mundo with Fronteras de la Noticia, a weekly Mexican tabloid based in the city of León in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Produced by Mexico’s Danilo Black Company and sold by the United Press Syndicate, Fronteras is already being published by the nearby Contra Costa Times, another Knight Ridder paper.  

Mexican newspapers may share cultural similarities with Spanish-language papers in the United States, but the needs of U.S. Latino readers are intrinsically different from the needs of those living in Mexico, says Jose Luis Benavides, journalism professor at California State University, Northridge and creator of the first Spanish-language journalism minor in the country. “They may speak the language but they don’t understand the context,” he says.  

Ethnic media has a history of helping migrant communities to assimilate, says Benavides. “They tell readers where to get vaccinations for their kids and how to operate in this country,” he says, along with covering issues of concern to their communities, including immigration, education and health—all of which can only be covered by local reporters.  

According to an employee of the San Jose Mercury News who did not wish to be named, the outsourcing of ethnic media represents “maquilajournalism,” and is akin to “a U.S. corporation killing off one of its own to bring in a foreign product.”  

Replacing Nuevo Mundo with what he calls “a cookie-cutter, low-cost, factory-produced tabloid from Mexico” comes “at the cost of the quality of journalism and U.S. Latino journalists’ jobs,” he says.  

Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism at USC Annenberg’s School for Communication, says Knight Ridder’s move to import a paper from Mexico is indicative of what’s going on in the industry as a whole. “Anytime you can produce for pesos and sell for dollars,” Gutierrez says, “you’re going to make money.”  

Nuevo Mundo hired a local staff, but its entrance into the market nine years ago was nevertheless met with protest. Frank Andrade, publisher of the 27-year-old newspaper La Oferta, was part of a group that objected to the newspaper’s tactic of giving money and free ad space to nonprofit organizations like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and then asking them to sign an exclusivity contract with the paper.  

Andrade was unable to prevent Nuevo Mundo from carrying out these business practices. But nine years later, La Oferta has a circulation of 103,000 and Nuevo Mundo, with a circulation of 57,000, is shutting down. Andrade was even asked if he wanted to buy Nuevo Mundo, an offer he turned down.  

He says his newspaper outlasted Nuevo Mundo because La Oferta represents a more authentic voice. “We’re 100 percent Hispanic owned,” he says, “and we know the customs and traditions of Hispanics.”  

Corporate interest in Spanish-language media is nothing new. “Our industry is vulnerable,” says Jonathan Sanchez, associate publisher and chief operating officer of Eastern Group Publications, an independent chain of bilingual newspapers in Southern California. “Mainstream corporations see the potential of the market and see an opportunity to make money,” he says.  

“What’s new is that this time, we’re being approached by people from other countries,” says Sanchez, who says investors recently offered to buy his own newspaper and replace it with one produced in Latin America.  

According to Sanchez, the main factor that determines why some ethnic media survive and others don’t is a lack of capital to compete with large corporate players. “In publishing, you have to run your paper as a business,” he says. “On the other hand, you have to be the voice of schools, the young, the elderly, etc. It’s a catch-22.”  

On the other hand, corporations like Knight Ridder may understand the business model and outspend their poorer ethnic media counterparts, but lack the community component to attract and maintain a loyal readership.  

“There’s a lot more to running a newspaper than publishing,” says Andrade. “You have to be a community leader.”  

Andrade sees the outsourcing of ethnic media as a national trend: Fronteras already appears in 14 U.S. markets. But he isn’t worried.  

“If [Fronteras] comes in the area and thinks it’s going to be a quick kill, they’re wrong. It’s not going to make a difference,” Andrade says. “In the newspaper business, there are no shortcuts. You have to earn every cent that you secure.”  

Elena Shore is a writer for New California Media, an association of over 700 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media.

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www.jfdefreitas.com To search for previous cartoons by date of publication, click on the Daily Planet Archive.



Unlike some ethnic enclaves, the Vietnamese-American community in Santa Clara county, does not lack for news in its own language. If anything, the community can access more news than a mainstream population reading in English only.  

Three Vietnamese daily newspapers, half a dozen weeklies and several monthly magazines cater to a Vietnamese-American population of 125,000, not to mention radio and television programs and an array of websites. The largest of the weeklies, Viet Mercury, was owned by the San Jose Mercury News, which has a bureau in Hanoi and shared its content with its English daily, adding a wealth of original information, in a non-advocacy role, into the mix.  

As one longtime Vietnamese reader in San Jose put it recently, “You read the Viet Merc and the San Jose Mercury News for information. You read community papers to know where the community stands on the issues and when to protest.”  

That unique mix of editorial missions may be ending, however, as the San Jose Mercury News recently sold its Vietnamese-language weekly. Viet Mercury has reportedly been bought by Jim Nguyen, a former sales employee of the weekly who now heads a group of Vietnamese-American businessmen. Its last issue will be Nov. 11.  

In an Oct. 21 press release announcing the sale, San Jose Mercury News Publisher George Riggs said that “buyers from the Vietnamese community” will “continue to serve the Vietnamese-reading community with the No.1-read publication in that language.” The Mercury News simultaneously announced the closure of its nine-year-old Spanish weekly Nuevo Mundo.  

Publishing since 1999, Viet Mercury was distributed free and had a circulation of 35,000. It began with great promises in the heyday of dot-com money, and was in the eyes of many media observers a new kind of marriage between mainstream and ethnic press—one perceived to be lucrative, and a trend.  

Back then it made sense. The majority of the Vietnamese-Americans in Silicon Valley are still first-generation immigrants. Though most are functional English speakers, many prefer to read in their own language. Many also have achieved financial success, owning real estate and small businesses.  

“Santa Clara county's Vietnamese community is a major market, with an estimated buying power of 1.8 billion,” wrote the Mercury News in 1999 as it launched the Viet Mercury. “Growing in size and buying power, this is a valuable audience for any advertiser.”  

That was before dot-com failures and before 9/11. After the high-tech bubble burst and the economy swooned, advertising revenue plummeted. Competition among ethnic media grew fiercer. While other Vietnamese-language newspapers were operating on the cheap, often out of small offices and with part-time employees, Viet Mercury had a large staff under high union rates. With those high production costs, it lost money.  

Yet the weekly arguably had much higher professional standards than others in its field. One case in point was the story of Bich Cau Thi Tran, a Vietnamese woman shot dead in her own kitchen by a San Jose policeman on July 13, 2003, as she held a vegetable peeler that resembled a knife. From July 14, 2003, to August 30, 2003, the Mercury News ran 29 stories on the incident, and Viet Mercury published 16. Cali Today, a five-times-a-week paper, produced 12. Seven different reporters covered the Tran case for both the Mercury News and the Viet Mercury, three of whom were Vietnamese-Americans. None of the Vietnamese-owned papers could match such firepower and professional standards.  

But such an operation became unsustainable when the economy worsened.  

“With Americans, commerce is No. 1,” Nam Nguyen, editor and publisher of Cali Today, whose Vietnamese readership spans the Bay Area as well Sacramento, recently told the Orange County-based Nguoi Viet newspaper. “But with Vietnamese, even if you operate at a loss, you still try to run the paper because your community still needs a voice.”  

In a sea of community-based newspapers, however, the Viet Mercury’s voice was unique, defining its role as providing “objective” information. It tended to cover stories “down the middle,” as De Tran, soon-to-be former publisher of the Viet Mercury, once explained. It left the role of advocacy to others.  

Nguyen Qui Duc, host of “Pacific Time,” a syndicated weekly radio program on KQED in San Francisco, says he hopes the new owners of the Viet Mercury will maintain the objectivity and balanced reporting that the original owners cultivated. The new paper “can be an advocate of the community—which is the normal role of newspapers in ethnic or minority communities—but it need not abandon quality or fall into the trap of running only articles that don't raise eyebrows,” Duc says. The Vietnamese community, he says, has matured and will not support anything less.  

Quynh Thi, executive editor of Vietnam Daily in San Jose, said that when Viet Mercury first launched she worried about competition, but soon found it operated in a different universe. “We're a daily, they’re a weekly. Our advertisers are also different, more community-based. Many of the Viet Merc's are big corporations.”  

But she added that the community is very curious about the sale. “What everyone is talking about now is who are these investors? No one seems to have come forward,” she says.  

One Vietnamese journalist in San Jose who would only speak anonymously repeated a growing rumor in the community: that “money from Vietnam is behind the sale.” In recent years, various Vietnamese citizens have bought businesses and real estate in California. Jim Nguyen, the journalist noted, had a hand in bringing San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh together as sister cities a few years back. Could he have brought Vietnamese money to the United States to buy media as well?  

As of this writing, Jim Nguyen has agreed to a later interview to respond to all the rumors. The community, in the meantime, is watching closely the evolution of the weekly. 

Andrew Lam is author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (Heyday Books, 2005).8

NO DEAL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

This is a response to Jill Posner’s letter claiming that the Sierra Club has made a deal with Magna/Caruso over development at the Albany Waterfront. I don’t know where Posner gets her information, but it is very, very wrong. The Sierra Club opposes the Magna/Caruso mall. It is completely contrary to the Sierra Club’s vision for the future Albany waterfront. If it is approved, we will lose our opportunity to get a real public shoreline with real public access for public use and enjoyment and we will keep the shoreline from becoming the private front yard to a huge shopping mall. Stopping the mall will also mean the chance for a real off leash dog park. If we stop the mall, we also stop Magna’s plans to build a race track and casino or “racino” as Magna’s CEO, Frank Stronach, likes to call his future vision for his race tracks. The track is on its last legs; it cannot survive without the mall and a casino operation. Once it goes, we can plan the future the way we want it, not the way Rick Caruso, a major George W. Bush financial contributor, wants for us. (Indeed, why should we help get him the profits to finance his support for the ultra-conservative agenda in the United States?) 

The proposed Magna/Caruso Mall also threatens the economic vitality of Berkeley’s Fourth Street, Solano Avenue, and the El Cerrito Plaza. Just as a Walmart sucks the economic vitality of local business out of a community, so will this upscale Super Walmart Mall (a Caruso Super W). The Sierra Club urges all residents of the East Bay to oppose the Magna/Caruso Super W Mall. 

Norman La Force 

Chair, Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter  

East Bay Public Lands Committee 

• 

LIES AND INTOLERANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Andrea Prichett writes a long commentary full of lies and racial intolerance. The tagline identifies her political affiliation with CopWatch. What Prichett fails to disclose is that she is employed as a writing teacher at the Alternative High School. One can only hope that she is not inciting the same hostility and lies in her classroom. But this being Berkeley, where rights and freedoms are often granted regardless of responsibility, I have concerns. I think the school district needs to remind her that this community values integration and tolerance. 

I have been the chair of the neighborhood group for the past three years. Our meetings attract large diverse turnouts. There is no tension between residents as Prichett insinuates. The tension comes from our collective frustration at being the dumping grounds for the worst social problems, the lack of support from public officials, and the meddling of political opportunists like Stegman, Neumann, and Prichett. 

Stegman, Neumann, and Prichett try to put blame anywhere but where it belongs. Outside of those still involved in the drug trade, I blame these alleged do-gooders, who have consistently disrupted the development of a viable community standard in Berkeley These political opportunists makes it their cause to promote contempt and disregard for decency and reasonable community standards. 

Laura Menard 

• 

TEEN LIBRARIANS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I agree with Mark Bayless about the terrible tragedy of the loss of the teen librarians in the local neighborhood libraries where teens could easily drop in for help with finding books and learning about topics and how to write research papers and have kindly interesting young adults to talk to about their school experience and how they are learning and growing in the world. Now, thanks to the arrival of the current director, Jackie Griffin, we no longer have the teen librarians where the teens can easily go from their homes. Now, if a teen is in need of help after school they are left to themselves or have to find the money to go by bus or walk a long way or get a ride from someone to go to the main library for the few hours any teen librarian guides are available. Now, the chances of having individual attention in an ongoing way has been cut off for the youth of Berkeley. Now, at a time when they need and deserve more attention they are actually getting less than they had before the arrival of Jackie Griffin.  

Part of the sad turn of events is that some of the librarians who were so wonderfully serving our youth have had to look for work in other counties so even if the hours were reopened in the local branches, the youth have lost their mentors forever. A silent tragic diminishment in the lives of many children in Berkeley. And no one knows. But, if we look at how the new director, Jackie Griffin, treated the adults of Berkeley, it may be realized that she was no more considerate of our rights or needs as human beings. She actually implemented the entire installment of the questionable radio identification devices in our library books, throwing out thousands of books into special dumpsters to reduce cost of device installation and all without ever asking us. She dismantled our trust the same way she dismantled the healthy thriving teen assistance programs serving the youth after school from the local neighborhood branches. Perhaps a time will come when we will vote for library director like we do for city auditor, mayor, and councilmembers. Someway the real needs we have in community deserve to be recognized and honored by the director.  

Nancy Delaney  

• 

MARIN AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I do like the bike lanes on the new Marin Avenue.  

Better yet, planting Sycamore Trees the entire length in the center of the avenue shall complete the design. I want a well designed, complete, elegant avenue. There are very few elegant avenues in the Bay Area. Sadly! 

Richard Splenda 

• 

WINDFALL PROFIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Today we were treated to the news that Exxon/Mobil and other oil companies are earning their highest profits ever in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In the meantime, the White House is attempting to cut Medicaid, privatize Social Security and reduce educational funding in order to make the tax cuts for the rich permanent, and pay for rebuilding New Orleans and an illegal war in Iraq. Oil company newspaper ads ask us to let them know if we see price gouging at the pump. I see price gouging all right, and it’s taking place at the top levels of corporate America and this government. How much privatization/piratization are we supposed to tolerate? 

So how about our representatives in Washington getting off their duffs while waiting for the Libby/Rove perp walk and introducing a 100 percent corporate windfall profit tax? They might want to haul in a few oil executives and the vice-president for questioning while they’re at it. Despite what the lobbyists in DC tell them, their job description says they work for the people of this country, not the oil companies.  

David Eifler 

• 

HURRICANE WILMA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wrote a letter after Hurricane Katrina had decimated New Orleans and left the city under five feet of water about the majority of black residents stranded there without water, food and electricity for five days. I posed the question, what if it had been white folk who had to go through the same experience as the left-behind residents of New Orleans?  

Lo and behold, in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, millions of Floridians are having trouble securing water, food, gas and have been without electricity for three days. Tempers are flaring and again the infrastructure for handling crisis has proved to be woefully inadequate. 

Ron Lowe 

Nevada City 

• 

UNION-BUSTING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Gov. Schwarzenegger made a big deal about his Screen Actors Guild membership in peddling his anti-labor ballot propositions during his grandstanding at the so-called Sacramento debate. He said: “I’m very proud to be a union member.” I, too, am a SAG member, of 15 years standing, and urge voters to reject the Terminator’s proposals which are injurious not only to my fellow workers in state employment, but by extension, to those of us in private industry, as well. SAG itself as a union opposes them. It seems that Arnie is following in the footsteps of two former SAG presidents, Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston, who also sold their souls for a mess of corporate pottage. But I’m sure the vast majority of SAG members will support the union’s stance in big business’s assault on the conditions of the working folks of California.  

Harry Siitonen 

• 

BUSH ADMINISTRATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Iraqi war is a meat grinder of the Bush administration’s own cynical making. They lied about WMDs to gain approval. Invading Iraq hasn’t captured Osama bin Laden, nor diminished Al Qaeda. On the contrary, more people have joined the insurgents to fight U.S. occupation. While we kill more Iraqis and lose more of our soldiers, grinding up more lives will not bring stability, nor peace, and certainly not democracy. Eventually, we will have to leave. Will it be soon, with 2,000 dead American sons and daughters, or later, when the body count is even greater? 

Bruce Joffe 

Piedmont 

• 

REPULSIVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wonder if other people, as I am, are so intensely repulsed by Bush, the man, and his speeches, that we cannot watch him on television. And thus, screaming in disgust, we turn him off and switch to another channel. Perhaps we should steel ourselves to the task of listening to Mr. Bush, no matter how high the gorge rises in our throats. I’m sure liberal Germans during the rise of the fuhrer turned off the radio in disgust and listened to Strauss waltzes to calm them down much to their detriment...as well as to the world’s detriment.  

Robert Blau 

• 

TOWING HEARING 

I am writing regarding a request to the Berkeley Police Department for a towing hearing which was made by phone this morning by Trevor Anthony Sherard. His car was taken on Sunday, Oct. 23 by Berkeley police for driving on a suspended license. 

I completed paperwork for Mr. Sherard to file motion-to-dismiss documents with the Berkeley court to dismiss charges against Mr. Sherard. This would establish that Mr. Sherard had his license improperly suspended over a year ago and that his car was illegally impounded by the Berkeley Police Department. He was not notified by the court of the original license suspension which was sent to a different address from where he lived. 

In addition, he was told by the officers who wrote up the charges and ticketed him, that impounding his car was “...no big deal—you’re just part of a quota, we have to get five cars today... it’s about money...” 

How many cars per day is the Berkeley Police Department mandated to impound, and how many cars per day is each police officer required to impound? What revenue does this generate for the Berkeley Police Department per year? What other agencies share this revenue and what is their cut? What happens to officers who do not meet their quota? Did the fact that Mr. Sherard is a young African American male have anything to do with the police stopping him, since he was driving properly and obeying the speed limit? 

Mr. Sherard was informed by the officers that he had three days to request a towing hearing, after which he would be charged a mandatory fee for 30 days of storage, and was given a phone number to call. He called the number this morning, got an answering machine in the Berkeley Police Department, where he left a message, and has had no response. 

Why is it mandatory to pay 30 days of storage for an impounded car if it is not released at a towing hearing which must be requested within three days of the impoundment? What happens if the call is made within the three-day period but the Berkeley Police Department fails to respond? 

I would like the Berkeley Police Department to answer my questions. 

Leuren Moret 

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In the wake of a United Nations investigation implicating a number of Syrian and Lebanese officials in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the Bush administration is calling for sanctions and leaking dark hints of war. But the United States is already unofficially at war with Syria. For the past six months, U.S. Army Rangers and the Special Operations Delta Force have been crossing the border into Syria, supposedly to “interdict” terrorists coming into Iraq. Several Syrian soldiers have been killed. 

The analogy the administration is using for this invasion? Cambodia, which the Nixon administration accused of harboring North Vietnamese troops during the war in Southeast Asia. On April 30, 1970, American and South Vietnamese Army units stormed across the border, igniting one of the great disasters of all time. The invasion was not only a military debacle; it led to the rise of Pol Pot, who systematically butchered some two million Cambodians. 

As in Vietnam, the American and British line in Iraq is that the war is fueled by foreign fanatics infiltrating from Syria and Iran. In an October talk to the National Endowment for Democracy, President George W. Bush told the audience that “Iran and Syria” have allied themselves with Islamic terrorist groups; he warned that the “United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them.”  

According to the Financial Times, the Bush administration is already discussing who should replace Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with the White House leaning toward sponsoring an internal military coup. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley—the fellow who brought us the Niger-Iran uranium fairy tale—is in charge of the operation. 

Flynt Leverett of the Brookings Institute says the cross border raids are aimed at encouraging the Syrian military to “dump” Assad. A military coup was how the United States helped put Saddam Hussein in power so he could liquidate the Iraqi Left.  

The White House, in fact, knows that foreign fighters have very little to do with the insurgency in Iraq. The conservative London-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that the number of foreign fighters is “well below 10 percent, and may be closer to 4 or 6 percent.” American intelligence estimates that 95 percent of the insurgents are Iraqi.  

The Bush administration has long had its sights on Iran, which Bush calls “The world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism.” These are sentiments recently echoed in London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair accused Teheran of smuggling weapons and explosives into Iraq to attack British troops in Basra. In one of history’s great irony challenged moments, Blair said “There is no justification for Iran or any country interfering in Iraq.” 

The U.S. has been provocatively sending unmanned Predator aircraft into Iran, supposedly looking for nuclear weapons, but most likely mapping Iranian radar systems, information the United States would need before launching an attack.  

A major player in all this is Israel, where the Likud and its U.S. supporters have lobbied for a U.S. attack on Iran and Syria. In a speech last May to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Richard Perle, a Likud advisor and former Bush official, said that the United States should attack Iran if it is “on the verge of [developing] a nuclear weapon.”  

Vice-President Dick Cheney has even suggested that Israel might do the job. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the United States recently sold Tel Aviv 500 GBU-27 and 28 “bunker buster” guided bombs (although Syria would be a more likely target for such weapons).  

Last month senior Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin admitted passing classified information on Iran to Israel through two AIPAC employees. Franklin used to work for former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and has close ties to neo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who says, “Tehran is a city just waiting for us.”  

If all these names sound familiar it is because they brought us the war in Iraq. Would the U.S. (possibly allied with Britain and Israel) actually attack Iran and/or Syria?  

Iran seems a stretch. The country has three times the population of Iraq, almost four times the land area, plus lots and lots of mountains you really don’t want to fight in.  

Iran also has considerable international support, demonstrated two weeks ago when Europeans said they would not back U.S. efforts to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council for supposed violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

While a number of nations are nervous about Iran’s nuclear activities, the country is not seen as a regional threat. Its military budget is only one-third what it was in 1980. It also doesn’t hurt that Iran has the second largest oil reserves on the planet, reserves that Europe, China and India simply cannot do without 

The Americans might bomb the hell out of the place but an invasion is doubtful, particularly given the current disarray of the U.S. military. 

One caveat could alter that: the U.S. doctrines of preemptive war and first-use of nuclear weapons. Would the White House really push the button? Not out of the question. 

According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, if it does come to war, Congress has no say in the matter. Asked if she agreed that the President would have to return to Congress in the case of military action against Syria and/or Iran, she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Oct. 19 that “the President retains those powers in the war on terrorism and the war on Iraq.” 

Syria is the easier target. With the exception of its northern border, the country is a flat plain, less than half the size of Iraq and with a population of only 16.7 million. It is also reeling from the U.N. investigation. 

This may make Syria look like fruit ripe for the picking, and an invasion would certainly divert attention from the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also be a logical extension of the Bush administration’s mythology that all our troubles in the Middle East are caused by foreign Islamic terrorists. 

For the outcome of such a strategy see the war in Southeast Asia. Count up the dead. 

• • • 

Untold Iraq story of the month: freelance journalist and author Robert Dreyfuss’s revelation that Shiite militias are terrorizing secular Shiites and murdering Sunnis. While Shiites are also being killed and intimidated—in particular by the followers of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi—the militias responsible are not tied to, nor supported by, the British and Americans. 

Dreyfuss, author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, says the situation has become so dire that it threatens to ignite a regional civil war that could draw in Iraq’s neighbors. 

The issue boiled over into a nasty fight this month between Iraq and Saudi foreign ministers (with the former calling the latter a “Bedouin riding a camel”) that ended up pushing the Arab League into launching a mission to head off a civil war. Dreyfuss concludes: “…if the United States would get out of Iraq, give the Arab league a chance to manage things there, and take part in the Arab-led talks with the Sunnis, catastrophe might be averted.” 

If things continue upon their present course—which “things” have that interesting habit of not always doing—somewhere in a school in North Oakland 50 years from now, a teacher will stand before a class and tell her (his) students the story of the day in 2003 when a courageous black woman, grown weary of the lies of the Bush administration, stood up by herself in the United States Congress and cast the single vote against the Iraq War Authorization, thus sparking a national movement that eventually led to both the collapse of neoconism as well as the end of the stranglehold of the radical religious right on the government of the country. 

Fifty years from now I don’t plan on being anywhere near North Oakland—not that I don’t like North Oakland, I just have other plans for that time period—but some of you will almost certainly be around, and you will remember these days, and you will say patiently (but a little wearily, because you’ve grown tired of correcting this particular mistake) that yes, what Barbara Lee did was absolutely courageous and no, you don’t want to minimize it’s historical importance or how much it inspired people at the time, but she was, after all, only part of a greater thing going on in the Bay Area in opposition to Bush and the neocons and the war, and it is that thing going on of people and opinions and actions and accomplishments which must be studied and talked about if one is to understand the history of those (these) times. 

But history loves the simple tale, if for nothing else in that it is so simple to tell. 

And so, this week, upon the death of the dear Ms. Rosa Parks, we must suffer through the recitation of the story—once more—about the courageous little Alabama black woman who got tired one day coming from work and refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, thus on-and-on, you know the rest of the tale. 

And at the risk of being accused of kicking dirt on the freshly dug grave of a beloved national and Civil Rights Movement icon, we are forced to say, once again, that no, that’s not exactly how it happened, and that it doesn’t take away anything from Rosa Parks to tell it right. 

At the time of Ms. Parks’ historic act in the mid-1950s, there were a number of African-American organizations in Montgomery—some of them based in the black church, some of them with ties to the union movement, some of them based in the black business or educational establishments—that had long been working to end racial segregation in public accommodations in that city. Rosa Parks herself was secretary of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had membership from all of those factions. 

As the story is told by those who were there at the time, in refusing to give up her seat, Ms. Parks actually repeated an action that had been taken several weeks before by another young black woman. Black Montgomery leaders briefly considered making that earlier action a test case, but decided against it when they learned that the young woman had a child out of wedlock. Afraid that Montgomery’s white segregationist establishment would pound on that single fact—“niggers dropping babies without fathers”—to turn local and national attention away from the issue of segregation, the black leaders searched around for someone who could not be attacked on such “moral” grounds. Rosa Parks was chosen, and the refuse-to-give-up-her-seat-on-the-bus incident was restaged so that she could be arrested, and the black bus boycott instituted as a “spontaneous” response of outrage. 

Personally, I think that either action—the spontaneous one of the earlier black woman as well as Ms. Parks’ planned demonstration—took equal courage in Montgomery in the mid-1950s, but that’s just me. 

And it is also interesting to see how little things have changed in human nature in the past 50 years. In the mid-1950s, just as it is today in 2005, it was easy to get people distracted from issues, muddying the waters with one moral issue—having a child out of wedlock—in order to cover up another one—oppressing a group of people because of their race. 

In any event, Rosa Parks herself tended to both resist her own deification and to try to tell the truth about what really happened in the months leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott. I got the chance to interview her by telephone some years ago, and she confessed that months before she refused to give up her seat, she was “very nervous, very troubled in my mind about the events that were occurring in Montgomery.” 

At that time, the summer of 1955, she was attending civil rights training workshops at a long-time labor and radical movement center called Highlander in Tennessee. One of her trainers was a woman named Septima Clark of Charleston, a giant in the Civil Rights Movement, but someone you’ve probably heard little or nothing about. “I had the chance to work with Septima” at Highlander, Ms. Parks told me. “She was such a calm and dedicated person in the midst of all that danger. I thought, ‘If I could only catch some of her spirit.’ I wanted to have the courage to accomplish the kinds of things that she had been doing for years.” 

Septima Clark was certainly someone to look up to. She had joined the NAACP in 1919—only a few months after it was formed—and worked in its initial campaign to end lynchings in the Deep South. As frightening as Montgomery in 1955 seems to us now—with its white terrorist bombings and racial murders and police attack dogs—South Carolina in the 1920s was a hundred times more dangerous for civil rights and Black Freedom advocates. 

But just like Ms. Parks, Septima Clark always minimized her own accomplishments, giving credit to the people who had come before her in even more dangerous times. The black Reconstruction-era officeholders, for example, who faced assassination in the reign of terror that came after union troops were pulled out of the South in the 1870s, the time of the original formation of the Ku Klux Klan by former Confederate officers and soldiers. Or, earlier than that, the Charleston Sea Island black folk—the people known as the Gullah—who had seized plantation lands from slavemasters in the midst of the Civil War, received General William Sherman’s promise that they could keep it (the famous “40 acres and two mules Special Field Order”), and later refused to give it up even after the United States Congress said that the former Confederates should have their land back. These were the people Septima Clark looked to for stories of courage and inspiration. 

Looking at Rosa Parks, therefore, we don’t see as much a “beginning”—a single spark lighting a prairie fire, to use Mao tse Tung’s famous phrase often-quoted by ‘60s-era radicals—as we do a “continuation,” a string of history running backwards and forwards through the momentous events of Montgomery, 1955, with courageous people rising to meet the challenges at different points, some of them well-known, some of them anonymous and lost to the history books. 

With Rosa Parks’ passing this week, therefore, we don’t see the end of the story. It’s only the turning of a page, and the moving on to another chapter. 50 years from now, I hope that’s the story that gets told. 

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I’m sitting here Tuesday night in my South Berkeley home contemplating Andrea Pritchett’s venomous Oct. 25 commentary, “No Simple Solutions for Berkeley’s Drug Problems,” when six gunshots ring out close by. I instantly call 911 and report the number of shots, and estimate direction and distance. The scariest part about it was that this is a completely ordinary part of life here—counting the shots and praying they don’t come in your window. 

One of my neighbors told me the other night that when she plays with her kid at our local playground, she always keeps him near the low cement wall, because if shooting starts she wants to be able to grab him and use the wall for cover. Another drills her kid in hitting the floor when the shooting starts. My own 2-year old recently brought me a hypodermic needle someone had tossed into our backyard, asking what it was. 

I am the lead plaintiff for the group of 14 South Berkeley neighbors—white and black--who are suing Lenora Moore in small claims court for allowing her home at 1610 Oregon St. to serve as a drug supermarket. Many others would have joined, but were too frightened to do so. Why? At the successful conclusion of a similar neighborhood suit in 1992, a firebomb was thrown at the house of its lead plaintiff. The intended message from the drug thugs was sent and received. 

We haven’t even concluded this case yet, but already Moore’s supporters are tossing around the equally incendiary charge of racism. Leo Stegman, Moore’s legal advisor from the East Bay Community Law Center, checks out the skin color of everyone in the court (Commentary, Oct. 21) and concludes that because there’s more melanin on one side than the other that racism must be involved. In her commentary, Pritchett writes that “Newly arrived white neighbors are often offended by the conditions they find in these neighborhoods.” I’ve got news for you, Andrea: It’s not just the white folks. There are many African-American families in South Berkeley, both newcomers and old-timers, who are doing their best to give their kids an alternative to the thug life. There are also plenty of Japanese- and Chinese- and Tibetan- and Yemeni-Americans who are offended by the gunplay and drug dealing as well. We’ve been working together for years to try to make this a better neighborhood and a safe place for kids to grow up. Pritchett and Stegman’s aim is to use race to divide us, for which they ought to be deeply ashamed.  

Pritchett has never spoken to us, never come to our well-attended neighborhood meetings, never helped pick up the liquor bottles and used condoms and crack baggies. She was not present at our first court hearing, and apparently has not read the very large volume of evidence we presented to the court and to Ms. Moore. She writes, for example, that “the neighborhood group bases much of its analysis on observations made from afar and based on hearsay and generalizations.” My wife and I live next door, and have watched eight years of drug transactions at 1610 while Lenora Moore placidly comes and goes, studiously oblivious to the dealing around her. All of the plaintiffs, in fact, lived within two blocks during the period covered by the suit, and most still do. In our suit, we cite a long history of specific incidents of dealing directly connected to 1610 Oregon, backed up by a very extensive record of arrests and calls for service from the Berkeley Police Department.  

Even Pritchett has to admit the inconvenient fact of the October 2004 raid that found cocaine, heroin, and a semi-automatic handgun in the house. Yet she and other defenders portray Ms. Moore as a perpetual hapless bystander. By their account she is to be held responsible for good works in the community, yet has no responsibility whatsoever for the criminal activities that take place at the house she owns. Yes, she did take out temporary restraining orders on six family members—but only after we filed our suit. Moore’s defenders try to present these orders both as evidence of her determination to do something about the problem and as some kind of proof that she is the victim of elder abuse. Contrary to what Osha Neumann claims, no court has ever ruled that she is the victim of such abuse, and she has presented no evidence of any abuse in court. 

Ms. Moore’s negligence enables the drug trade in our part of South Berkeley. Berkeley police officers testified in court that her home is a “safe house” for local dealers, who are free to come and go. Even after she was under a supposed stay-away order, Moore’s adult daughter was dealing down the street at Oregon and California, and sending back up to 1610 for a bowl of gumbo—“with extra crab.” A 15 year-old grandson who is under her guardianship also deals at the corner, and also gets meals delivered to him from 1610. By her own admission, Moore has never tried to enforce any of the restraining orders. Instead, she has turned a blind eye to the criminal activities of her children, grandchildren, and their many associates. Now we’re in court asking her to take responsibility.  

One final point: Moore’s defenders keep talking as though going to court were the neighbors’ first recourse. It was not. We worked with the city and the Police Department for six years to try to find a solution, including bringing in Adult Protective Services, whose services Ms. Moore rejected. We went to mediation with her at East Bay Community Mediation, but failed to reach an agreement. Just this week we offered to try mediation again, but were rebuffed. We have literally tried everything we can think of to remedy a very long-running and ugly situation. Going to court was truly our last resort.  

Where, on the other hand, have Moore’s defenders been all these years? They’ve never come to our neighborhood meetings, never come forward to help this supposedly helpless woman chase away the dealers from her property. They only show up now to smear good people as racists for standing up to the drug thugs who control our streets. Into a community already poisoned by crack and heroin they’re trying to inject racial division. Makes a firebomb look kind of benign by comparison.  

Paul Rauber is an editor at Sierra Magazine and a former columnist for East Bay Express. 

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Secrecy has been perhaps the most consistent trait of the George W. Bush presidency. Whether it involves refusing to provide the names of oil executives who advised Vice President Dick Cheney on energy policy, prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, or forbidding the release of files pertaining to Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure in the Justice Department, President Bush seems determined to control what the public is permitted to know. And he has been spectacularly effective, making Richard Nixon look almost transparent. 

But perhaps the most egregious example occurred on Nov. 1, 2001, when President Bush signed Executive Order 13233, under which a former president’s private papers can be released only with the approval of both that former president (or his heirs) and the current one.  

Before that executive order, the National Archives had controlled the release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which stipulated that all papers, except those pertaining to national security, had to be made available 12 years after a president left office.  

Now, however, Mr. Bush can prevent the public from knowing not only what he did in office, but what Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did in the name of democracy. (Although Mr. Reagan’s term ended more than 12 years before the executive order, the Bush administration had filed paperwork in early 2001 to stop the clock, and thus his papers fall under it.) 

Bill Clinton publicly objected to the executive order, saying he wanted all his papers open. Yet the Bush administration has nonetheless denied access to documents surrounding the 177 pardons President Clinton granted in the last days of his presidency. Coming without explanation, this action raised questions and fueled conspiracy theories: Is there something to hide? Is there more to know about the controversial pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich? Is there a quid pro quo between Bill Clinton and the Bushes? Is the current president laying a secrecy precedent for pardons he intends to grant? 

The administration’s effort to grandfather the Reagan papers under the act also raised a red flag. President Bush’s signature stopped the National Archives from a planned release of documents from the Reagan era, some of which might have shed light on the Iran-contra scandal and illuminated the role played by the vice president at the time, George H. W. Bush.  

What can be done to bring this information to light? Because executive orders are not acts of Congress, they can be overturned by future commanders in chief. But this is a lot to ask of presidents given the free pass handed them by Mr. Bush. (And it could put a President Hillary Clinton in a bind when it came to her own husband’s papers.) 

Other efforts to rectify the situation are equally problematic. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, has repeatedly introduced legislation to overturn Mr. Bush’s executive order, but the chances of a Republican Congress defying a Republican president are slim.  

There is also a lawsuit by the American Historical Association and other academic and archival groups before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. A successful verdict could force the National Archives to ignore the executive order and begin making public records from the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.  

Unless one of these efforts succeeds, George W. Bush and his father can see to it that their administrations pass into history without examination. Their rationales for waging wars in the Middle East will go unchallenged. There will be no chance to weigh the arguments that led the administration to condone torture by our armed forces. The problems of federal agencies entrusted with public welfare during times of national disaster—9/11 and Hurricane Katrina—will be unaddressed. Details on no-bid contracts awarded to politically connected corporations like Halliburton will escape scrutiny, as will the president’s role in Environmental Protection Agency’s policies on water and air polluters. 

This is about much more than the desires of historians and biographers—the best interests of the nation are at stake. As the American Political Science Association, one plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, put it: “The only way we can improve the operation of government, enhance the accountability of decision-makers and ultimately help maintain public trust in government is for people to understand how it worked in the past.” 

Kitty Kelley is the author of The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. 

The City of Berkeley projects budget deficits into 2007. Some argue that these deficits are due to excessive compensation received by city workers. While workers certainly receive fair compensation for their work, this compensation is not the source of the problem and is far from excessive. 

Salaries, for example, afford workers a decent standard of living. But given the immense wealth in California, workers’ salaries are hardly excessive. California’s economy is the fifth largest in the world, but wealth is distributed mainly to the richest in the state. There are approximately 350,000 California households with a net worth of more than $1 million. Corporate executives in California typically earn up to 400 times as much as their average employee and those working for large corporations are compensated at an average rate of more than $12 million annually. Take the case of Disney’s Michael Eisner who, despite earning close to $100 million annually throughout the 1990s, awarded himself an historic $565 million stock option payday in 1997.  

Turning to healthcare, the city pays the cost of health insurance premiums for workers and their dependents. And while the cost of insurance premiums is certainly fueling the city’s deficit, worker demands for affordable health insurance are not the problem. Instead, it is the skyrocketing cost of health insurance that makes it increasingly difficult for employers, such as the City of Berkeley, to provide workers with affordable healthcare.  

Since 1999, premiums paid to health insurers in the U.S. have risen, on average, more than 10 percent each year. And while access to affordable healthcare is prohibitive for millions of Americans due to spiraling costs, profits for health insurance companies are the highest they’ve been since the early 1990s. Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which covers one of every three people with health insurance in the U.S., doubled its profits in 2003 with premium increases ranging from 10 to 16 percent. 

With respect to retirement, the city pays into CALPERS (California Public Employees Retirement System) for workers. CALPERS is the last of a dying breed: a retirement system that guarantees a pension, or defined benefit. 

CALPERS has come under fire at the local and state levels. In Berkeley, BASTA argues that workers, instead of the city, should pay into CALPERS. What BASTA doesn’t mention is that the city began paying into CALPERS only after workers agreed to forgo one time salary increases. 

At the state level, our governor suggests that the costs associated with CALPERS are too much for the state to bear, and that workers with public pensions are a greedy special interest group. Is it greedy for workers to demand a secure retirement? Or is greed that which compels the governor to privatize public pensions so that he can line the pockets of his allies on Wall Street, even if such a move could threaten the retirement security of working people across the state? Furthermore, the governor’s pension privatization plan would likely cost California taxpayers more money, despite his claims to the contrary. 

Additionally, the city’s deficits are due, in part, to government policies that have resulted in deep cuts to federal and state funding that municipalities depend on. 

The cost of the Iraq war has now reached more than $200 billion. This reckless spending has meant ballooning federal deficits and President Bush has used these deficits to slash funding that goes to the states for programs that serve low income children and families, the elderly, and the disabled. It is estimated that the war has cost California $26.2 billion.  

And while Bush pours more and more money into the war, he is bankrupting the country further by cutting taxes for the richest Americans. Bush’s latest round of tax cuts will give millionaires a raise that amounts to approximately 13.5 percent of their income (compared to about 1 percent for the majority of Americans). In addition, corporate taxes are at their lowest level in 20 years. Nearly 95 percent of U.S. corporations now pay less than 5 percent of their income in taxes. This despite a corporate tax rate that officially stands at 35 percent. 

To make matters worse, our governor, facing sharp cuts in federal funds, vows to balance the budget wholly on the backs of the poor and working class Californians (by cutting services) while leaving in place a regressive tax structure in which the poor pay 12 percent of their income in state taxes while the wealthiest Californians pay 7 percent. And with California’s deficit surging, the governor has taken monies away from Cities and Counties across the state. According to the California State Association of Counties, California’s cities and counties agreed to give back a combined $2.6 billion to help the governor address the state’s budget deficit. Cities across California, including Berkeley, will likely face more of the same: sharp decreases in state funding and a shifting of local revenues from cities and counties to the state.  

While much of the responsibility for local budget problems rests squarely on the shoulders of Bush, Schwarzenegger and their corporate backers, there is still the matter of Berkeley’s budget deficit. So what is to be done? We can begin with a few basic assumptions.  

First, all working people are deserving of a decent wage, affordable healthcare, and a secure retirement. Secondly, the city’s deficits are due, in large part, to a health care system that values profit over people; to the war on and occupation of Iraq; to a regressive tax system; and to state and federal policy makers who insist that budgets are best balanced by cutting services for the poor, as opposed to taxing the rich. It behooves all of us to focus on the true source of the problem. In this way, we might wake up one day to find that everyone has access to quality affordable healthcare, that our tax dollars go toward human needs instead of war, and that the burden of taxation does not fall most heavily on those who are least able to afford it. In short, we might just wake up to a better world. 

Michael Marchant is a social worker and union member living in Albany.

Soup stains, skid marks 

rips and tears 

Danglin’ threads and pubic hairs. 

I put on my pants to keep me warm, 

Got a nice color 

but they are rather worn. 

Would get some more from the Free Box 

But it just burnt down. 

Firefighters put it out and left with a frown. 

“If we hadn’t been here, we’d lost the town”. 

They get $5,000 a month to put out flames. 

Detectives want to know who did it and who’s to blame, 

and its the poor who now bear the shame. 

We don’t deserve the Free Box, cause we just sit 

around. 

Like the Fire Fighters when they are not saving town. 

a

Concerning Antonio Rossman’s remarks in the Oct. 7 Daily Planet, I would like to make several comments. Rossman says the following: “In the court’s words, ‘It therefore appears compelling that the statutory allowance for settlements in closed session not override extrinsic requirements for public proceedings.’ In lay terms and common sense: more important than settling city litigation is the right of citizens to learn in advance and influence the settlement terms.” 

Sorry, in lay terms, this part of the ruling eludes common sense. The court said, at the very beginning of its discussion: “First, the S.A. [Settlement Agreement] is intrinsically invalid because it includes commitments to take or refrain from taking regulatory actions regarding the zoning of Trancas’s development project, which may not lawfully be undertaken by contract. Secondly, the S.A. is also invalid as a municipal act because its adoption in closed council session violated the Brown Act. Because of this invalidity, the association’s further contentions under CEQA and the Map Act are moot.” 

Just following the passage Rossman quoted from the ruling is the following: “This would mean that a settlement approved in closed session could not include agreement to take government action that independently required a public hearing….” Now this is entirely moot and actually nonsensical, because the city could not take that action in an open session meeting, either, for the first reason given at the beginning of the court’s discussion. Requirements for future public hearings and all other such requirements cannot be contracted away, period. Individuals interested in wheeling and dealing should join the private sector and get the hell out of local politics.  

The Brown Act has nothing at all to do with the holding in this case, and this court does not do justice to the Brown Act issues. The premise is wrong —there is no “statutory allowance for settlements in closed session,” at least not under such circumstances as occurred in the LRDP lawsuit. The final approval, of course, may be held in closed session because that requires weighing and assessment of the settlement offer and not just the mere reporting of it. Legal analysis may always be discrete, but the mere reporting of the offers and negotiations must always be done in open session. That is the law. 

Mind you, the effect of this ruling was only to invalidate the settlement agreement. The logic of this ruling might invalidate the settlement agreement in the LRDP lawsuit here in Berkeley, but it would not allow the setting aside of the voluntary dismissal or the reopening of the case challenging the LRDP. It is true that a notice of settlement presages a dismissal, but a voluntary dismissal is not contingent upon the settlement. The dismissal would stand with or without a settlement. Upon the invalidation of the settlement agreement, the LRDP would still stand, and the citizens, having won the battle, would still have lost the war.  

My motion and appellate petitions are the only way to win the war. My petition for review was just denied by the California Supreme Court. Now the preliminaries are out of the way and I can begin my real mission: appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. I expected a biased court in California— it only stands to reason—a single citizen taking on two of the largest behemoths in the state will not do well within that state, unless the judiciary is of sterling character, which was apparently not the case.  

Moreover, I feel that it was not so much me or my arguments that were shut out, but God Himself, or Truth Itself. These justices heard the ring of truth and did not like the sensation—that was the major problem, in my opinion. Pardoxically, I may get a better result from the Roberts court, if indeed he is as open to God as he claims. We obviously disagree on the political implications of religious belief, but the mere openness to God or Truth may actually be there and facilitate their ability to actually hear the motion. He that hath ears let him hear. 

With respect to Rossman’s admonition that “Berkeley should now suspend all action to implement the settlement with UC pending finality of the Malibu case,” of course he is right, except insofar as the objectionable clauses may be severable. The failure to do as Rossman suggests will point once again to the complete disingenuousness of our city government when it comes to legal issues. Recall how they jumped to revoke the ban on TIC’s in response to a mere trial court ruling in San Francisco, which did not set precedent and was entirely distinguishable from the comparable situation here in Berkeley.  

Peter Mutnick is a Berkeley resident. 

›

With cellphones off and no chance to call 911, the audience faces the ground floor interior of an old wood house in Seattle, strewn with packing boxes, the bannister of a staircase turning up and away from the tableaux of figures facing each other at the doorway, one in bright daylight, the next in darkness, as the grandfather clock tolls the hour. 

The play of Finn in the Underworld begins on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage with quick alternation: light and dark, female and male pairs, reunion and first meeting. 

Two middle-aged sisters, Rhonda (Randy Danson) and Gwen (Lorrie Holt), reunite querulously over packing up the remnants of life in their family’s house, coming back together in their home town after their mother’s move to a retirement home to close up the old place for sale. 

Meanwhile—or meantime? The times are staggered—Gwen’s 20-something son Finn (Clifton Guterman) is following up a chance meeting with a tryst with an old neighbor and friend of the family, Carver (Reed Birney). Later it will turn into a homoerotic makeout session as a bare lightbulb swings from the ceiling of a cellar room-cum-bomb shelter where “people just don’t go.” It is a place where many sexual games have been played over the years, from Carver playing “doctor” with Finn’s aunt Rhoda to more deadly secret “fun.” 

The two parallel lines of telling the story converge, break apart again and reconverge, going over the same ground. There are many repetitions, deadly hints that seem to become explicit, then ambiguous again. In the balance hangs the fate of Carver’s brother, of Carver himself, the role of Finn’s grandfather in their fate, what Rhode and Gwen knew or saw and how it made them what they all have become. The inference and implications strain the edges of the story. The canvas doesn’t broaden, but bends, folds, turning inward. The house itself seems to swallow up the family with its secrets, like a cannibal parent devouring its progeny. 

The Rep offers up this Halloween treat more like a trick, with a parental advisory over the heavy petting and hints at the joys of asphyxiation. It’s a socio-psychological spook show, with back-and-forth role playing by the cast (who perform it well, especially Randy Danson). It is a kind of psychodrama/mock lecture on the aura of fear in the days of bomb shelters and “normal” nuclear families.  

Playwright Jordan Harrison has remarked that the film The Haunting (by Robert Wise, who died last month) was an influence on his characterization of the house, and that the crazy non-Euclidean geometry of storylines that converge in the second part owes something to his teacher, playwright Paula Vogel and her maxim “that each play should fall apart in pursuit of its aesthetic goal. That there’s a place in each play where once the audience learns the rules, you should start to twist them a little bit.” 

This seems to be in the great tradition of horror, always an erotic medium (as the word “nightmare” has come to imply). Personifications of houses, their identity with family secrets, go back to the allegories of the Middle Ages, surface again in the Baroque and in the gothic tale, as modernized (and burlesqued) by Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” most famously—or, awful with incest and black humor, “Berenice”). 

There’s a whole strain of American theater and film dedicated to the haunted house, such as George M. Cohan’s Seven Keys to Baldpate and Roland Young’s remarkable film The Bat Whispers, whose success and moody style and techniques were snapped up by the horror and suspense genre, like Tod Browning’s Dracula and Mark of the Vampire and Hitchcock’s atmospherics. 

But these old potboilers had a hidden sophistication in their theatricality. They could send up their own melodrama knowingly, use the very double standard that provided the dilemmas for their shockers and cliffhangers to make a kind of irony of middle class morality. There’s a good reason why Surrealists pirated gothic kitsch. Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, where a corrupt bunch of bourgeois seem unable to quit the house of their reveling, is an artistic triumph of an old trouper’s method for squeezing an old plot for juice, blood from a stone. 

Finn in the Underworld remains more intriguing than frightening or revelatory. It identifies and comments on the problem rather than playing it. There’s something a little academic in its fooling around with storytelling conventions; the horror gets swallowed up by them rather than conveyed. 

Jordan Harrison has a dowser’s instinct for where that horror is, but there is more poignancy in his comment that “before it takes a turn for the worse, it’s a weird love story—or a last-ditch attempt for connection, at least,” than what the play itself can muster. Something’s off in the emphasis, as in the accent, when he remarks, “I want to make people scared of the dark.”  

Contributed photo  

Lorri Holt, Randy Danson, Clifton Guterman and Reed Birney in the world premiere of Jordan Harrison’s Finn in the Underworld at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.a

“We’re cooking live on-stage, every performance,” said director Clive Chafer of TheatreFIRST’s Northern California premiere of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, opening tonight (Friday) at the Jewish Community Center. 

The play, on a tour of three small Bay Area stages, features eight actors playing 40 characters, handling 125 props, 45 of which are edible. 

“It’s one of our postage stamp epics,” Chafer said, “showing food to be what transcends all divisions of religion, culture, ethnicity and nationality in Israel and the occupied territories.”  

The play began in London a few years ago when writer Robin Soanes was commissioned by the non-profit Caird Co. to construct a play about everyday life in Israel/Palestine in the style that’s become known as “verbatim theater.” After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Soans traveled to the area with two stage directors—one Jewish, the other Arab—returning with over 100 interviews.  

“He interviewed everybody, from transvestite prostitutes in the street, to falafel shop owners whose buildings had been blown up, to transplants from New York City to Jerusalem, getting all of them to talk about food while cooking or eating,” Chafer said, “It’s a patchwork of stories in 25 scenes, some characters recurring—part cooking demo, part docu-drama, part report from the front lines.” 

Chafer said some characters have direct experience with suicide bombings, but others have a more indirect relationship to the violence. 

“One transplant starts eating at a chain of fast food stands that suffered bombings, saying if customers don’t come, the bombers will win,” he said. “It’s about what it’s like to live in an undeclared war zone.” 

Soans’ first rule of playwrighting is: don’t try to make it a political play. The details of everyday life are what reveal the truth of the situation. 

“Israel and the occupied territories are a melting pot, not so different from the U.S.A.,” Chafer said. “There’s great diversity; one character’s a Greek Orthodox Arab married to a priest at the Church of the Nativity. All have common ground in the passion for, and delight in, the food of the Eastern Mediterranean, which all eat, but each prepares differently.”  

TheatreFIRST seeks to bring plays dealing with important international issues to Bay Area audiences. Chafer said the company had developed a series of plays about identity—racial, ethnic, religious—and conflict.” 

The company has recently produced a play about Indian immigrants to America, one about a Latino who lives in North American traveling in Latin America and David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, about his trip to Israel/Palestine where he met with various newsmakers. 

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook can be seen as a sister play of sorts to that work, Chafer said, “but one that draws out strands in common from everyday life that will become threads in the fabric of peace.” 

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook will follow the same path of Via Dolorosa, from the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center, then to Old Oakland Theater on Ninth Street near Broadway, and finally to the Traveling Jewish Theater in San Francisco. 

Chafer said he was excited about the new Oakland venue. “In our swank new location, in a beautiful row of Victorians in Old Oakland, we couldn’t be better placed. There are at least seven restaurants and two places to have a drink right by the theater. And there’s free parking in a lot a block away.” 

TheatreFIRST presents The Arab-Israeli Cookbook Oct. 27-Nov. 6 at the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley; Nov. 10-20 at Old Oakland Theatre, 461 Ninth St., Oakland; and Dec. 1-4 at the Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. 

Show times: 8 p.m. Thursday–Saturday; 3 p.m. Sundays. There will be no Friday performances at the BRJCC (Oct. 28 and Nov. 4), and BRJCC’s Nov. 6 show will be held at 7 p.m. rather than 3. Tickets: $1-$22. Half-price for those under 25 years of age. $3 discount for seniors, students and members. Pay what you can on Nov. 3. For more information, call 436-5085, or see theatrefirst.com. 

FRIDAY, OCT. 28 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley ” Six Degrees of Separation” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. through Nov. 19. Tickets are $10. 649-5999. wwwaeofberkeley.org 

Albany High School Theater Ensemble “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at the Albany High School Little Theater, 603 Key Route Blvd. 558-2500, ext. 2579. 

Berkeley HighSchool “The Laramie Project” Sat. and Sun. at 8 p.m., at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $12, $6 student. 332-1931.  

Berkeley Rep “Finn in the Underworld” at 8 p.m. at the Thrust Stage and runs to Nov. 6. Tickets are $43-$59. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Achilles & Patroklos” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., through Nov. 20. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381. centralworks.org 

Piccolo Teatro di Milano “Arlecchino” at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus, through Oct. 30. Tickets are $65. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Festival 2005 Awards and screenings at 7:30 p.m. at Oaks Theater, 1875 Solano Ave. Tickets are $10-$12, festival pass $20-$25. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

Berkeley Art Center International Small Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. to Oct. 29 at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Free. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Doctor Atomic Goes Nuclear “On the Beach” at 7 p.m. and “Five” at 9:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Oil For Freedom” Photographs by David Bacon of Iraq’s oil workers. Reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at The Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery, 2324 Shattuck Ave.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Arts Festival: Bi-Lingual Poetry Reading with Frenando Torres, Leticia Hernandez, Ivan Herrera at 8 p.m. Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery, 2324 Shattuck Ave. 665-9496. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

Kim Stanley Robinson introduces his new disaster novel, “Fifty Degrees Below” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Balkan Cabaret at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $10-$15. 701-1787. 

Béla Bartók Choir and University Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Regents’ Theater, Valley Center for the Performing Arts, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 436-1330.  

Los Boleros at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Deborah Levoy and Greg Lamboy at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

Nicolas Bearde & His Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tony D. & Junglz Apart, Caribbean/Soca Showcase with Brother Resistance, Yasine Kouyate, Wawa Silvestre, Drumologist, Freelance and Aziza at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Deborah Levoy at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Marley’s Ghost at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Boom Boom Bollywood, hip hop and bhangra, at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $12-$15. 465-8480.  

Denise Perrier Quartet, with pianist Andrei Kondakov, at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Myra & Kevin and The D Sides at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

James Low, Farmer, Firecracker at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Eddie Haskells, Trouble Maker, The Insurgents at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

John Howland Trio, roots acoustic music, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

Midnite, reggae from St. Croix, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25-$27. 548-1159.  

Guru Garage, jazz funk, at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Clifford Brown 75th Birthday Celebration Trumpet Summit with Arturo Sandoval, Benny Golson, Randy Brecker and many more at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $18-$30. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, OCT. 29 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Betsy Rose, music for the fall season, at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568.  

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Festival 2005 Screenings begin at 1 p.m. at Oaks Theater, 1875 Solano Ave. Tickets are $10-$12, festival pass $20-$25.  

Farewell: A Tribute to Elem Klimov and Larissa Shepitko “Sport, Sport, Sport” at 5:45 p.m. and “Come and See” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

THEATER 

“The Arab-Israeli Cookbook” a play by Robin Soans at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $22. 848-0237.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Kiana Brooks reads from “Rush into Romance - Caught” at 6:30 p.m. at 3201 Shattuck Ave. at Woolsey. Especially for girls age 12-18. 500-1516. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Arts Festival: “ Two by Four” Piano duos in various combinations with Sarah Cahill, Katrina Krimsky, Barbara Higby, and Joseph Kubera at 8 p.m. at 2324 Shattuck Ave.Cost is $10.  

Kensington Symphony “Russian Romantics” at 8 p.m. at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 545 Ashbury Ave., El Cerrito. Suggested donation $8-$10, children free. 524-9912. 

Baroque Etcetera “Joy, Despair and Double Concertos: The Mastery of JS Bach” at 8 p.m. at The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, 1823 Hearst St. Suggested donation $10. 540-8222.  

Gamelan Sari Raras Javanese Gamelan & Shadow Play at 7:30 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 642-4864.  

Hilary Hahn, violin, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$58. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Day of the Dead Concert, medieval music sung by Coro Ciconia, at 8 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington St., Albany. Tickets are $5-$10. 843-0450. 

Kenny Washington & Michael O’Neil Quintet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tom Rigney & Flambeau at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Midnite, roots reggae from St. Croix, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $25-27. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

TC and Rich Hubbard at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Subnautic at 8 p.m. with Night of (Scary) Voices at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bryan Girard Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

Jean White with guests Will Scarlett & Dale Miller at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Murder Ballads & Songs of Misery and Despair at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Babyland, Midnight Laser Beam, 8-Bit, James Eskel at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 30 

THEATER 

Traveling Jewish Theater, “Voices Underwater” at 7 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $12. 415-522-0786. www.atjt.com 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Festival 2005 Screenings begin at 1 p.m. at Oaks Theater, 1875 Solano Ave. Tickets are $10-$12, festival pass $20-$25. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Dr. Wennesland, An Icon Among the Beats” at 2 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Sponsored by Nordic 5 Arts. Reception follows. 845-4956. 

Doctor Atomic Goes Nuclear “The Most Dangerous Man Alive” at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

EXHIBITIONS 

“Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco”guided tour at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. 

“The Danube Exodus” A colloquium at 2 p.m. at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. www.magnes.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Arts Festival: Political Satire with Karen, Ed, Selma, Stoney and more at 8 p.m. at 2324 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

Poetry Flash with Francisco Aragón and Christopher Sindt at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. Donation $2. 845-7852.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Arts Festival: Jerry Kuderna, piano, at 4 p.m. at 2324 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

Voices for Hurricane Relief a capella groups including The Edlos, Clockwork, Solstice and others at 7 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2075 Eunice St. Tickets are $20-$22. 528-8844. 

Arlo Guthrie at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$48. 642-9988.  

California Revels All Hallows Eve Showcase at 2 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10 adults, $5 children. 925-798-1300. 

“Pegasus Quartet” at 7 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Donation $10, children free.  

“The Passing of the Spirits” medieval music by Healing Muses at 4 p.m. at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 1501 Washington St., Albany. Tickets are $15-$18. For reservations call 524-5661.  

Terrence Wilson, pianist, at 4 p.m. at Regents’ Theater, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $25-$35. 601-7919.  

Philip Thompson’s Quartet Brasil at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ.  

Gift Horse at 10 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Pastor Dan Damon CD release of hymns at 5 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St., Pt. Richmond. 964-9901. 

Halloween Jazz Benefit for the Jazzschool at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $75, $125 per couple. 845-5373.  

Wake the Dead at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

MONDAY, OCT. 31 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Arts Festival: Book Party for Morton Felix’s first novel at 7 p.m. at 2324 Shattuck Ave. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com 

Bill Press, political commentator, discusses “How the Republicans Stole Christmas” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

www.codysbooks.com  

Poetry Express Theme Night: “Trick or Treat” at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Americana Unplugged Season Finale Jam-Bo-Ree at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

TUESDAY, NOV. 1 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Trees: A Favorite Subject in Japanese Art” including works by Hoshi, Saito, Tanaka, Hasui and Sekino at the Scrptum-Schurman Gallery, 1659 San Pablo Ave. 524-0623. 

“New Works” by Andrea Voinot at North Berkeley Frame and Gallery, 1744 Shattuck Ave. 549-0428. 

THEATER 

Unconditional Theater “Swing State Stories” at 7:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

FILM 

Alternative Visions: New York City: Four Shorts by Ernie Gehr at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Davy Rothbert reads from his short stories in “The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Margaret Cho explains why “I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50. 548-1761.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performs Schumann’s “Rhenich” Symphony at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $10-$54. 841-2800. www.berkeleysymphony.org 

Edessa, Balkan music, at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 7:30 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singer’s Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Josh Workman, solo jazz guitar, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 2 

EXHIBTIONS 

“The Art of Metal” Jewelry, sculpture, and tableware by 73 California artists opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St.  

FILM 

The Unofficial Histories of Péter Forgács “The Bartos Family and Dusi and Jeno” at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Candice Millard tells the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s trip up the Amazon in “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852.  

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

St. Mark’s Choir at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way at Ellwsorth, Donations accepted. 845-0888. 

Concerto Competition at 7:30 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. tickets are $3-$10. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Ned Boynton Trio at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Whiskey Brothers, Old Time and Bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Gerard Landry & The Lariats at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Eric Rangle & Orquestra America at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Teja Gerken, Claus Boesser-Ferrari, Adam Levy at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50- $18.50. 548-1761.  

Calvin Keys Trio Invitational Jam at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 3 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco” guided tour at 5:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2625 Durant Ave. 642-0808. 

THEATER 

“The Arab-Israeli Cookbook” a play by Robin Soans at 8 p.m., Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $22. 848-0237.  

FILM 

Embracing Diversity Films “The Mexican Laborer” at 7 p.m. in the Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. 527-1328. 

The Unofficial Histories of Péter Forgács “The Maelstrom” at 5:30 p.m. and Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan at 7:30 at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ernesto Cardenal, poetry and conversation with the former Minister of Culture of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua at 6:30 p.m. at the Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 849-8232. 

“The American Self in Film” with David Thomson and Mike Katovich at 7:30 p.m. at College Prep School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 339-7726. www.college-prep.org/livetalk 

Deema Shehabi, Palestinian poet, at 7 p.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 16. 

Lunch Poems with California Poet Laureate, Al Young, at 12:10 p.m. at Morrison Library in Doe Library, UC Campus. 642-0137. http://lunchpoems.berkeley.edu 

Nomad Spoken Word Night at 7 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Richard Clarke introduces his first novel “The Scorpion’s Gate” at 12:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com  

Walter Kirn introduces his novel of the American West “Mission to America” at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 845-7852. www.codysbooks.com 

Word Beat Reading Series with Julia Vinograd and Richard Silberg at 7 p.m. at Mediterraneum Caffe, 2475 Telegraph Ave. 526-5985. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sarine Balian, jazz and traditonal Armenian songs, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10. 849-2568.  

George Brooks & Shweta Jhaveri, new Indian jazz, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jazz Fourtet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Fishtank, Romainian, gypsy, flamenco at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. www.epicarts.org 

The Wailin’ Jennys at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Casey Nell, Cas Lucas at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 .  

Terry Rodriguez, piano and Sheldon Browne, reeds, at 8 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810. ?

If you are one of those damned souls who has traveled “the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,” the well-worn path from lisping your ABCs, to juvenile reader, to adolescent bookworm, to adult bibliophile, and finally to full-blown bibliomaniac, then you know that “of making many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” 

You begin with a Penguin paperback Hamlet for English 101, and quickly decide you should have the Bard’s complete works in the Riverside edition. Soon you must have the Applause facsimile of the First Folio and then you hit the brick wall of knowing that the closest you will ever come to one of the 240 or so extant copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio is viewing two pages of it through the glass pane of a vitrine. Now there is an answer to your problem without resort to theft or psychoanalysis. 

When John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems, hit that wall, he decided to turn some of his rare tomes, as well as others from such venerable institutions as the British Library, Library of Congress, and Folger Library, into CD and DVD-ROMs so that the common reader could almost touch some of the world’s rarest, most beautiful and most significant books. 

These discs make it possible to examine and magnify in minute detail not just text and illustrations, but even the paper, watermarks and binding. Although for now we still see through a glass, it is no longer darkly. It is as if someone, our computer genie, were willing to take an infinite amount of time to display every detail of a treasured object, its hand-tooled leather bindings, translucent watercolors, the very texture of the paper. There is none of that greying out of the page that you find in many facsimiles. The presence of each book is almost palpable.  

The Octavo Editions series covers classics in art, architecture, botany, zoology, religion, science and literature and, although the actual book is viewable in its pristine form, plenty of explanatory background material is provided as well. While the prospect of owning Gutenberg’s Bible, Redouté’s Roses or Tory’s Champ Fleury rang my bells, the following titles made this old English major positively salivate:  

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the chef d’oeuvre of Aldus Manutius, the greatest printer of the Italian Renaissance, has fascinated poets, psychologists and iconographers for half a millennium. Anyone interested in dreams, erotica, alchemy, architecture, hieroglyphs, emblems, allegory or symbolism has probably stumbled upon this title and its hermetic illustrations and wondered about its author, its euphuistic language and its meaning. 

It reads like a collaboration between Baron Corvo and Carl Jung. The real author is unknown even though the name Francesco Colonna is encrypted into the text. Joscelyn Godwin, whose 1999 translation is the only complete English version, pays lip service to Colonna in that volume, although two years earlier in Prague he told me that he was convinced by recent scholarship that Leone Battista Alberti, the humanist author and architect, wrote this strife of love in a dream. Whoever wrote it, the book is one of the most beautiful ever printed and all of that loveliness comes through in this disc.  

Octavo has three Shakespeare offerings: Sonnets (1609), Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (1623), and Poems (1640). Sonnets, one of only 13 extant copies, allows us to see the sequence of 155 poems, including potentially significant typographic peculiarities, as it was first published. That means that “A Lover’s Complaint,” with its complementary parallel themes, often incorrectly separated from the sonnets, is here to give closure to the cycle.  

Shakespeare’s dramatic works, the First Folio, is the sole authority for half of his plays and the single most important book in all of English literature. As Joyce said when asked what single book he would take to a desert island, “I should like to say Dante, but I would have to take the Englishman because he is richer.” The quality of this copy, formerly owned by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts who kept it in an ornamental casket carved from the famous Herne’s Oak of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a gift from Queen Victoria, surpasses that of the copies I have seen at the Huntington, Morgan Library, or the one loaned to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.  

Poems is a bit of a curate’s egg since the publisher, John Benson, omitted eight sonnets, reordered the rest and altered the pronouns to obfuscate the fact that some of Shakespeare’s most passionate utterances were to a young man. Some but not all of Shakespeare’s other non-dramatic poetry is here as well as poems by such of his contemporaries as Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh and the too-little-known Richard Barnfield. His “If music and sweet poetry agree” and “As it fell upon a day” were long thought to be by Shakespeare himself.  

When Dr. Samuel Johnson almost single-handedly compiled his Dictionary (1755) he created both a masterpiece of English lexicography and of literature. He gave elegant definitions and cited classic examples for 45,000 words. My favorite has always been his definition – vexing to the Scottish – of oats: “A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” With these Octavo discs, you have instant access to every entry.  

William Blake is also represented by three works. Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794 and 1826) allows us to compare an early and late version of the great mystic’s most famous and beloved illuminated work. The stained-glass-like reproductions, the monitor’s light coming from behind the image, surpass even the old Trianon Press printings. Blake hand-colored his printed works, his style evolving as he got older, so each copy is a unique variant.  

Blake’s 43 engravings for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1797) reveal that the artist was greater than the writer whose words he was illustrating. Blake’s images bring out a depth in Young’s poems that lay dormant before their pairing. Again, two stylistically different hand-colored copies are presented in full.  

The Book of Urizen (1818), a gnostic meditation on the sources of human consciousness, with Urizen (“your reason”) as an imprisoning demiurge, is among Blake’s greatest achievements as poet, painter and printer.  

My printing teacher, Harry Duncan, used to say that the greatest printers of all time were Gutenberg, Blake and William Morris. The Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer’s Works (1896) is Morris’ crowning achievement. The illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, whose copy this was, fit the text and exquisite borders perfectly. The making of the handmade paper, the acquiring of the German ink, the cutting of the Troy typeface demonstrate the same intentionality we associate with the alchemist or the rites of the Golden Dawn mages. 

This project is exciting not only because of the texts chosen, their low cost and high quality, but because it puts in the hands of the average reader materials that normally are examined by only the most prestigious scholars. This series is doing for the study of books what VHS and DVD have done for film study and what the CD has done for music study: make them not just the private preserve of a few elitist collectors and scholars, but the common cultural property of all of us, as it should be. It is the democratic fulfillment of Gutenberg’s dream. 

For more information about Octavo Editions see www.octavo.com, or call (800) 754-1596. 

Courtesy of Octavo Editions 

Octavo’s reproductions of the title page of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. B

FRIDAY, OCT. 28 

Reduced City Services Today Call ahead to ensure programs or services you desire will be available. 981-CITY. www.cityofberkeley.info 

Sydney B. Mitchell Iris Society Annual Beardless Iris Auction and Sale at 7:30 p.m. at Lakeside Garden Center, 666 Bellevue Ave., Oakland. Free. 277-4200. 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Prof. W. Norton Grubb, “Crisis in K-12 Education.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Waterwise Plant Sale through Nov. 7, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. 

“Non-Violent Resistence in Palestine” with Ayed Morrar and Jonathan Pollak at 7 p.m. at AK Press, 674A 23rd St., Oakland. Donation $5. 208-1700. 

Activism Series: “Climate Change and The Precautionary Principle” with Tom and Jane Kelly at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, Cedar at Bonita. Suggested donation $10. 

AARP Driver Safety Class from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and on Nov. 4, at Albany Senior Center. Cost is $10. 559-7225. 

The Truth About Bats with bat conservationist Maggie Hooper at 7 p.m. at RabbitEars, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free. For school age children. 525-6155. 

Lunar Lounge Express, A party under the stars to view the Red planet at 8 p.m. at the Chabot Space and Science Center, 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $15-20. 336-7300. www.chabotspace.org 

Day of the Dead Celebration on Solano Ave. Gather at 6:30 p.m. at Solano and Alameda. Bring a photo of those you wish to remember, a candle, flowers or food to feed their souls. 527-5358. www.solanoave.org 

Three Beats for Nothing sings early music for fun and practice at 10 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 655-8863. 

Cinéma and Dinner at The Alliance Française of Berkeley at 7 p.m. at 2004 Woolsey St. Free, but everybody brings something. 548-7481 or afberkeley@sbcglobal.net 

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. wibberkeley@yahoo.com 548-6310, 845-1143. 

SATURDAY, OCT. 29 

Haunted Halloween Caves at Tilden Nature Center from 1 to 3:30 p.m. with crafts and refreshments at the end. For ages 3 and up. Cost is $3-$5. 525-2233. 

Boo at the Zoo A family-friendly Halloween celebration from noon to 4 p.m. at the Oakland Zoo. Free with zoo admission. 632-9525. www.oaklandzoo.org 

“Color in the Native Garden Twelve Months a Year” A presentation by Alrie Middlebrook at 1:30 p.m. at Merritt College, Oakland. Presented by Alameda County Master Gardeners. 639-1366. www.middlebrook-gardens.com 

Free Compost Give-away by the Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Saturday Farmers’ Market, Center St. at MLK Jr. Way. Bring your own buckets. 548-3333. 

“Global Palette of Plants for Waterwise Gardening” a workshop from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $40-$45. 643-2755. 

“Claremont Neighborhood Tour” with UC students Mei Minohara and Ayano Kira. Meet at noon at the Claremont Gates, Claremont Ave., across from Star Grocery. minoharamei@hotmail.com 

Softball Clinic for girls in grades 2-9, from 1 to 4 p.m. at Grove/Russell field, Martin Luther King Jr Way and Russell St. Free. Registraion required. clinics@abgsl.org, www.abgsl.org 

Community Service Fair and Open House from noon to 4 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, 2407 Dana at Channing. 848-6242. 

Mars Mania Costume Party and Mars Viewing at 8 p.m. at Chabot Space and Science Center. Tickets are $13 adults, $9 student and senior. 336-7373. www.chabotspace.org 

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Haunted House performance tour at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 6 p.m. at Oakland School for the Arts, 1800 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5-$7, children under 7 free. 873-8800.  

Halloween Bazaar with face painting, children’s games, apple bobbing, pumpkins, rummage sale, book sale, food, crafts, and a haunted house from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The New School of Berkeley, 1606 Bonita St. at Cedar. 548-9165. 

“Gaza Disengagement and the Importance of Equal Rights for Palestinians” with Ilan Pappe, historian and senior lecturer in political science at Haifa University, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. Cost is $20.  

Village Gathering for African Americans with Disabilities A day of information, resources and support at the Cesar Chavez Educational Center, 2825 International Blvd., Oakland. Conference from 8:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. followed by vendor fair to 4 p.m. 547-7322, ext. 15. 

InterRacial Sisterhood Project Conference from 1 to 5 p.m. at Barrows Hall, UC Campus. Cost is $15-$25, includes workshops, entertainment and refreshments. 377-0020. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. For reservations call 238-3234.  

Spirit Walking Aqua Chi (TM) A gentle water exercise class at 10 a.m. at the Berkeley High Warm Pool. Cost is $3.50 per session. 526-0312. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 30 

Remember to Set Your Clocks Back at 2 a.m.  

Pumpkin Carving Bring your own pumpkin and we will get creative in carving them. From 2 to 4 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Autumn Family Day at the Richmond Art Center Pumpkin-carving, mask-making, apple-bobbing and performan- 

ces from 1 to 4:30 p.m. at 2540 Barrett Ave. at 25th St., Richmond. 620-6772. 

Harvest Festival with music, food, activities for all ages, demonstrations, tours of sustainable crop plantings and more, from noon to 3 p.m. at the Gill Tract, 1050 San Pablo Ave., Albany. Wheelchair accessible. Sponsored by Urban Roots. 235-5519. 

Halloween Street Scare All ages block party with face painting, mask making, pumpkin carving, costume contest, games and food, from noon to 5 p.m. at 23rd and Telegraph, in downtown Oakland. 238-9171. www.rpscollective.com 

Day of the Dead Fruitvale Festival with artists, performers, vendors and informational service providers from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at International Boulevard between Fruitvale Ave. and 41st Ave., Oakland. 535-7176. 

“Murder Mystery in the Kensington Library” A community participatory event at 2 p.m. at 61 Arlington Ave. Free. 524-3043. 

The Slow Life A gathering of Bay Area Simplicity Circles, from 5 to 8 p.m. at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Donation $3. Pot luck, call for details. 548-2220, ext. 233. www.meta 

foundation.org/simplicity 

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour of the South Berkeley Sidewalks led by Ken Duffy with Lincoln Cushing, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For information call 848-0181. www.cityofberkeley. 

info/histsoc 

Women of Color Resource Center Anniversary Celebration with Assemblywoman Karen Bass, at 11 a.m. at the Oakland Rotunda in City Center. 444-2700. www.coloredgirls.org 

“From Hillary to Harriet” The Religious Right’s Assault on Our Fundamental Rights at 1 p.m. at the Northbrae Church, 941 The Alameda. Sponsored by the Socrates Fellowship. 843-6798. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

MONDAY, OCT. 31 

Halloween at Habitot, a not-too-scary event for infants and toddlers at 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at at Habitot, 2065 Kittredge St. 647-1111, ext. 16. 

Critical Viewing An ongoing group to examine the art/craft(iness) of short films and television productions and its effects on our daily lives, at 1 p.m. at the BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Free. 848-0237.  

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, NOV. 1 

Birdwalk on the MLK Shoreline from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. to see the shorebirds here for the winter. Beginnners welcome, binoculars available for loan. 525-2233. 

Flu Shots for Berkeley Residents age 60 or over or “high-risk” from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Health Clinic, 830 University Ave. For information call 981-5300. 

Nonviolent Activists from Palestine/Israel Palestinian Ayed Morrar and Israeli Jonathan Pollak will speak on their work in nonviolent resistance to the occupation in Palestine at 7 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. 236-4250. www.norcalism.org  

“Ghostwriters in the Colonial Library: African Islam” with Prof. Sean Hanretta, Stanford Univ. at 4:30 p.m. at 652 Barrows Hall, UC Campus. 642-8338. 

Outdoor Digital Photography with Brandon Andre at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $20-$35. Registration required. 527-4140. 

Zonta Club of Berkeley meets at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant. The speaker will be Rita Maran, President United Nations Association, East Bay. Dinner is $21. Reservations required. Please RSVP to 925-376-4370. www.zonta.org 

Berkeley Salon Discussion Group meets to discuss “Current Elections” from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St. Please bring snacks and soft drinks to share. No peanuts please. 601-6690. 

University Press Books Book Party celebrating new books by Charis Thompson and Trinh T. Minh-ha at 5:30 p.m. at 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

“Professionalizing Your Home-Based Business” with Leslie Philbrook, of Biesheuvel, Scarpa & Co. at 7 p.m. at the El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Avenue, El Cerrito. 526-7512. 

Sing-A-Long from 1 to 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122. 

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043. 

“Daytime Care for Older Adults” with Maureen Dixon of Alameda County Services at 4 p.m. at Center for Older Adult Services, 828 San Pablo Ave., Albany. 558-7800. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 524-9992. 

Introduction to Buddhist Meditation at 7 p.m. at the Dzalandhara Buddhist Center in Berkeley. Cost is $7-$10. Call for directions. 559-8183. www.kadampas.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org  

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 2 

“The Dirty War in Argentina” with Patricia Isasa at 7:30 p.m. La Peña. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Venezuela Bolivariana: People and Struggle of the 4th World War” a documentary at 7 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Free, donations of $5 accepted. 393-5685.  

Bookmark Reading Group meets to discuss Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” at 6:30 p.m. at 721 Washington St., Oakland. 336-0902. 

University Press Books Book Party celebrating a new book by Roger Hahn at 5:30 p.m. at 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

Community Dinner at Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda at 6:15 pm. Cost is $8 for adults; $3.50 for children under 12. For reservations call 526-3805.  

“Comparative Religious Thought and Culture” with Dr. Felix Wilfred, Univ. of Madras, India at 7 p.m. at Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Ave. 649-2440. 

Aerial Classes for adults and children in spinning, climbing, sitting and dancing on trapeze begin at Studio 12, 2525 Eighth St. 587-0770. www.movingout.org  

Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College Open House at 6 p.m. at 2550 Shattuck Ave. Tours of classrooms and clinics and information for prospective students. To RSVP call 666-8248, ext. 106.  

Berkeley Communicators Toastmasters welcomes curious guests and new members at 7:15 a.m. at Au Coquelet Cafe, 2000 University Ave. at Milvia. 435-5863.  

Entrepreneurs Networking at 8 a.m. at A’Cuppa Tea, 3202 College Ave. at Alcatraz. Cost is $5. For more information contact JB, 562-9431.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Action St. 841-2174.  

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes. 548-9840. 

Prose Writer’s Workshop An ongoing group made up of friendly writers who are serious about our craft. All levels welcome. At 7 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. georgeporter@earthlink.net 

Sing your Way Home A free sing-a-long at 4:30 p.m. every Wed. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch Bring your knitting, crocheting and other handcrafts from 6 to 9 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/ 

vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, NOV. 3 

Flu Shots for Berkeley Residents age 60 or over or “high-risk” from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Health Clinic, 830 University Ave. For information call 981-5300. 

“The American Self in Film” with David Thomson and Mike Katovich at 7:30 p.m. at College Prep School, Buttner Auditorium, 6100 Broadway, Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 339-7726. www.collegeprep.org/livetalk 

Embracing Diversity Films “The Mexican Laborer” at 7 p.m. in the Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. 527-1328. 

Consumer Protections for Seniors: How to Avoid Scams and Frauds at 1:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

Internet Resources on Aging at 4 p.m. at Center for Older Adult Services, 828 San Pablo Ave., Albany. 558-7800. 

Prostate Cancer Screening for uninsured or low-income men from 4:30 to 7 p.m. at Alta Bates Markstein Center. Free, but appointments required. 869-8833. 

“Harvesting the New American Dream” AnewAmerica’s 6th annual Gala, celebrating immigrants, refugees, and new citizens, as successful micro entrepreneurs, at 6 p.m. at the Holy Redeemer Conference Center, 8945 Golf Links Rd. Oakland. Tickets are $75. 540-7785. www.anewamerica.org 

Better Referral Network Visitors Day at 7 a.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck at Cedar. 527-5267. www.bni.com  

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

FRIDAY, NOV. 4 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Al Young, the California Poet Laureate on “Creativity is Human Survival: A Poet’s View” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020. 

Benefit with Dolores Huerta, United Farmworkers at 7:30 p.m., at St Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison. Donation $10. To benefit School of the Americas Watch. 597-0171. 

Latinos in Baseball with Tito Fuentes and Diego Segui at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Tenth and Oak Sts. 238-2200. www.museumca.org 

“Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage” with author Heather Rogers at AK Press, 674A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Asian Business Association Benefit Fashion/Variety Show at 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $10-$12.  

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041. 

Women in Black Vigil, from noon to 1 p.m. at UC Berkeley, Bancroft at Telegraph. 548-6310, 845-1143. 

ONGOING 

Election Officers Need for Nov. 8th. Must be registered to vote in Alameda County and have basic clerical skills. Training provided. For information call 272-6971.  

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., Nov. 2, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Tasha Tervelon, 981-5190. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/women 

Community Environmental Advisory Commission meets Thurs. Nov. 3, at 7 p.m., at 2118 Milvia St. Nabil Al-Hadithy, 981-7461. www.ci.berkeley. 

ca.us/commissions/environmentaladvisory 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 3, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Jeff Egeberg, 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

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Monday’s “revelation” that the Tonkin Gulf resolution, the basis for U.S. entry into the Vietnam conflict, was somehow “doctored” provides yet another opportunity to marvel at the apparent inability of the people who are supposed to be running this country to find out what’s going on. If we are to believe Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, it’s news to him. According to the New York Times, “Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.“ 

Well, we’ve never believed McNamara before, so there’s no real reason to start now. But if he’s telling the truth, it’s deeply shocking. He’s a bright guy, and was well placed at the time to find things out, and he didn’t know?  

The news accounts this week indicate that a historian looking at old National Security Agency documents figured out what went on with the Tonkin Gulf incident back in 2002, but intelligence officials kept his findings secret because they might engender public doubt about the rationale for entering the war on Iraq, just then being ginned up for the 2003 invasion.  

Well, yes. Those of us who were pretty sure, at least by 1965, that the push to get into Vietnam was based on phony evidence were not surprised to see the pattern repeated in March of 2003. But just about everybody in Congress except Barbara Lee endorsed the Iraq invasion. So did most of the self-important newsies—not just the obvious neocons but “liberals” working in the major media, like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and David Remnick of the New Yorker. They didn’t seem to remember the Tonkin Gulf resolution, or perhaps didn’t know that it was a fraud.  

The philosopher George Santayana is often quoted in contexts like this: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Sometimes the quote is modified to “those who do not know history,” but history can be falsified, as today’s story shows.) 

Those of us who have been around for a while have an advantage here. I was about 25 when I began to doubt what they were telling us about the Tonkin Gulf incident, and 40 years later I’m fortunate enough to be able to remember how the scam unfolded, unlike those who might not have been taught the true history of the Vietnam war in school.  

But how did I find out what was going on in 1965? I can’t quite remember any more. I wasn’t an important person, just the wife of a grad student, the mother of two babies, the part-time editor of a medical magazine and a Democratic Party volunteer. No special sources. I checked with my long-time partner in crime, and with another old friend and co-conspirator from those days, and they can’t remember how they knew either. “Everyone knew,” my friend said. By the spring of 1966, we’d found an anti-war candidate to run in the Democratic congressional primary. (Though he lost, because “everyone” didn’t know quite yet.) 

This has become a familiar theme in these pages. Why do many of us who are not highly placed in the U.S. power hierarchy know more about what’s going on than those who are supposedly powerful and well-informed? What caused the executive editor of the little Berkeley Daily Planet and many of its opinion contributors to doubt Judith Miller’s story about the aluminum tubes from the first moment they saw it, while the editorial executives at the rich and powerful New York Times claim to have swallowed it whole hog?  

One key factor is the role of the alternative media. In the mid-’60s we had only one real alternative, I.F. Stone’s Weekly newsletter. We probably found out what we knew about Vietnam from Izzy Stone, who found out what he knew by pouring over government documents. His secret weapon was that he’d taken a good hard look at the world, and had some idea of what he was looking for as he worked.  

Stone’s heirs were all of the alternative newspapers which sprang up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, fueled by their founders’ convictions as Stone had been by his. These crusading publications are sadly diminished in numbers these days because of the corporate acquisition of what turned out to be profitable businesses. One worthy survivor, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, is in the process of launching a crusade against a deal which the Bay Guardian first reported on in August. The two largest alternative newspaper chains, New Times Media and Village Voice Media, are planning to merge in a deal that will give Phoenix-based New Times Media control over 17 alternative weeklies, including the East Bay Express and SF Weekly. These papers by and large toe the establishment line. Their rhetoric is outraged, but their allegiance is conventional, with successful local real estate developers particular favorites.  

If the anti-trust laws have any purpose at all, it ought to be to prevent mergers like this one. The Bay Guardian is already suing the New Times chain for another unfair practice, predatory pricing of advertising: selling ads below cost in order to put the competition out of business. In an editorial, Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond noted that California Attorney General William Lockyer’s office is now looking into possible antitrust violations by the chain. He said that “in an era of increased news media consolidation, when major news outlets are the print and broadcast equivalent of McDonald’s, the pact could bring more homogeneity to the last bastion of irreverence and print muckraking. It ought to be a matter of public concern.” We strongly agree. Without the principled alternative press, there will be even more frauds like Tonkin Gulf and the fictitious weapons of mass destructions, repeated and amplified by an ever-gullible mainstream press establishment. 

In September of 2001, the average house in zip code 94703 sold for $375,000. In September of 2005, the average house in 94703 sold for $780,000. 

Is this fact relevant to the current crusade by 94703 homeowners to rid their neighborhood of undesired elements? It’s certainly not the whole story, but it should be kept in mind when trying to analyze what’s going on there, especially when the focus of the unwanted activities is the home of someone who pre-dates the rise in property values. 

It’s a daunting task to try to explain the Constitution of the United States to homeowners with blood in their eyes, but we’ll give it a shot. Parts of a couple of articles in the Bill of Rights are relevant to the situation. 

The stated intent of the complaining 94703 residents is to force the defendant, a neighboring homeowner, to sell her property, whether she wants to or not. The intention appears to be to punish her for allowing persons previously convicted of criminal behavior, who might or might not be related to her, to hang around her house. There are also allegations that such persons are repeating the criminal behavior for which they were previously convicted. 

Even if all the allegations of the complainants are true as charged, is it constitutional or wise to use the small claims court to try them? If anyone, the long-term homeowner defendant herself or one of her associates, has broken a criminal law, shouldn’t they be charged and tried in accordance with the Constitution? The problem is that the small claims court, where the complainants have filed their complaint, does not offer the legal procedure which the Constitution requires for those charged with criminal offenses. 

Article VI spells out how it should be done:  

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury … and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”  

Small claims court offers none of the above protections. And then there’s Article V: “… nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...” 

The defendant homeowner has been subject, for the same offence, whatever it is or was, to a previous round of small claims prosecutions, but the judgment against her was never collected. Should she have to go through the whole thing again? Is it a good use of the small claims system to accumulate uncollectible judgments against an elderly defendant? Does this attempt to force her to sell her property meet the due process of law requirement? If she loses this round, some attorney will probably raise these constitutional questions at some point in time. 

Not that the complainants don’t have a major point, of course. No one should have to live in a neighborhood where criminal behavior is tolerated. But stopping criminal behavior should be the responsibility of the police, not of the small claims court, which can do nothing to stop real crimes.  

It’s dangerously naïve to think that forcing one elderly homeowner to sell her house by getting another uncollectible small claims judgment against her will stop the drug-dealing in the 94703 area. What will, eventually, change the kind of criminal activity in this neighborhood is the numbers at the top of this piece. It’s only a matter of time before the kind of people whose major means of support is street crime will be forced out of 94703 by economic pressure. But they’ll just move to another neighborhood, inflicting their anti-social behavior on a new group of less-affluent neighbors.  

A West Berkeley renter of my acquaintance told me that she complained about her downstairs neighbor’s drug-dealing, first to the police and then, when nothing happened, to her city-funded “area coordinator.” He told her that her only remedy was to use the organization which is promoting the small claims solution. A homeowner I know in another city finally had to move because her local police didn’t seem interested in stopping prostitutes from doing business in the alley next to her house. Where are the police in these situations?  

On Wednesday night at about 11:30 we dropped friends at a Fourth Street parking lot where they’d left their car. There were two police cars parked side by side in the empty lot. In the 15 minutes it took us to get home (94705) we saw six more parked police cars on the street. We drove by the corner of Oregon and California, the focus of these lawsuits, but there were no police cars in evidence there. If the situation is as described by the complaining neighbors, at least one of those eight parked police cars could have been doing some good on that corner at that time of night. We’d welcome a commentary from someone in authority explaining, in detail, why the police can’t seem to do anything about drug-dealing in South and West Berkeley.  

• • • 

One more thing: No matter how just complainants might think their cause is, there are some tactics which are beneath contempt. We have, with some misgivings, printed in this issue yet another letter from one of them, even though we think she’s finally stooped too low. She’s now trying to go after the teaching job of a (perhaps even misguided) civil libertarian who came to the defense in these pages, on humane grounds, of the old lady who’s the defendant in the lawsuit.  

We think the teacher, Andrea Pritchett, is pretty tough, and she can probably defend her job on her own, so we decided to run the letter. If the writer is willing to put these sentiments in a letter, she’s probably also expressing them elsewhere, so it’s better to get them out in the open for public scrutiny.  

But we want to go on record as telling the writer, as strongly as we know how, that we think it’s reprehensible to go after the job of someone with whom you disagree on a matter of principle. Andrea Pritchett doesn’t deserve to be fired for thinking you’re a bigot. We’re old enough to remember Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, who specialized in this kind of attack. If you’re not, go see Good Night and Good Luck.  

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